1.
INTRODUCTION
An actor can remember, night after night,
long speeches and lengthy roles in a play, and a pianist’s eight fingers, when
he plays without music, will somehow remember to hit all the right notes, often
at speed, in a piano concerto or in the playing of any complicated piano
pieces, those fingers flying in different directions over the keys. Both learn by repetition. Yet the actor’s and the pianist’s feats of
memory will fade away in time and be largely, if not entirely, forgotten when
supplanted by other words and music and not repeated, although some snatches of
words and music will linger in the mind.
On the other hand, the trick of balancing on a bicycle and riding it is
never forgotten, although the routines of existence generally are – washing,
dressing, eating, going to work and work itself – unless there is something odd
and unusual about an event, and also when something happens for the first time,
a one-off event, and never again.
Memories are uncertain, incomplete and
delusional, rather like dreams. More than
once I’ve wondered when writing these memoirs of times long past and of places
far away from where I am now, whether the events, and even the spoken sentences
that are summoned up in my mind, actually happened or were said. There is no way of verifying if this or that
happened in the dream-like way that I recall, unless I confer with someone who
was present at the time. And then that
person will remember things differently, if at all, and will seldom if ever be
able to fully substantiate what I recall as having actually occurred. What is recalled, by him or me, is also
always partial and curiously selective.
When there is no one available to verify a certain happening, I have
then no alternative but to believe that my memory of an event is true, that it
really did take place, more or less as I remember, and that I didn’t imagine
it. After all, how could I remember
things that never happened? Why would
I?
In this respect I’m not like Theseus’ poet
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream whose pen, as his imagination ‘bodies forth the
forms of things unknown … gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a
name.’ Memory isn’t creative, although
in the telling one may choose to elaborate a scene creatively – as some
biographers and autobiographers do, sometimes excessively, mixing fiction with
fact, imagining lengthy scenes and conversations, feelings and thoughts. I haven’t done so, only doing so in part when
a memory is backed up and supported by evidence from factual sources – from
photos, maps, from pocket diary entries, newspaper articles and reviews, from
school reports, postcards, letters and various documents. In this I’ve been lucky, having many such
sources at hand.
I’ve
also gleaned invaluable information from tape-recordings, from one made by
Helen Johnson, from the letters of Mrs Bond, from taped conversations that I
had with Mrs Hutchison, with Alison and Johnny Walker in the 1980s, and from material
contained in Wikipedia and the Net. Magnus Magnusson’s book about the Edinburgh Academy,
The Clacken and the Slate, published by Collins, was very helpful, as was A
History of University College, Oxford
by Robin Darwall-Smith, published by Oxford University Press, which also
published a useful history about OUDS by Humphrey Carpenter. Most invaluable of all have been the three
volumes of my Aunt Dorothy’s Memories and the three CDs of taped conversations
I had with my sister, Marion, at Peebles in 1981.
Yet still I doubt and wonder. Did my father really say, ‘Why are you so
beautiful?’ Did an American really say,
‘I sure would like to seduce you?’ Did
my mother really tell me I was conceived on the bedroom floor? Did I really do all the things I remember
doing? And did they really happen the
way they did and when I think they did?
Did I also see, and hear, ghosts?
Many events I can’t remember at all. And I
wonder why this is. My Troop Commander
in Hong Kong wrote in my Service Record that I
was ‘a popular entertainer at Troop Smokers,’ and that I showed ‘organising
ability in this line.’ I remember
nothing at all about any Troop Smoker. Absolutely nothing. Nor do
I remember much about relationships or why they were sustained or dropped. Why do
we like some people more than others and why do we not respond to some people in
a positive way? Why are we attracted to some and dislike
others? Why do we continue or
discontinue relationships? Those that
have lasted have altered so much in the passage of time that what they were
like originally is lost in the mists of days long past. And yet
some of them, a few, have been maintained in friendship’s name, and for the
sake of some kind of continuity, in keeping hold of times past, of what went
before.
I’ve tended to avoid personal revelations. They
are another story, another sort of story.
I was never good at taking the initiative and I can’t believe how often
over the years that I was taken by surprise.
I still am.
That might have been the title of this
book, Taken by Surprise. For I’m
constantly being surprised by what people do and say, by how things turn out the
way they do, by seemingly chance and accidental meetings and events. Is there ‘a divinity that shapes our ends,
rough-hew them how we will?’ Is there a
pattern, a hidden purpose, a weaving together of events and people, like a
tapestry? And what part do luck and chance play? Or rather is it all a mix of happenstance,
decisions and choices, made by others as well as by oneself, that determine
what happens along the way?
And then there are the hidden influences
of what happened before we were born. It
seems to me not impossible that genetic borrowings from our parents’ and
grandparents’ memories and lives, and from even further back, somehow influence
our characters and our lives. We are all part of what went before, and also of
who went before.
In writing these memoirs I have been
hearing echoes of myself in other people, and echoes of people and places that
others knew. Australia
and India
re-echo throughout these chapters. Some people and some places seem comfortable
and familiar, as if I had known them before, as if I had been there
before. And I wonder whether deeply
buried ancestral memories are stored in the recesses of our minds – racial
memories of long-past people, places and events. For
everywhere and always everyone leaves behind them something of themselves.
What follows is a partly remembered story,
pieced together, of my first thirty years.
Make of it what you will.
2. GORDON AND LOUIE
I was born in Karachi,
which was then in British India, in September 1936,
three years before the start of the Second World War.
The hospital where I was born was the Lady Dufferin
Hospital, a long, two-storey building,
with many arches like a minor Indian palace, in north Karachi.
Built in the 1890s it was due west of St Andrew’s Church where my
parents had married in 1927.
My birth certificate, taken from a ‘True
Extract from Duplicate of Register of Births in the Municipal Limits of
Karachi’ tells me that I weighed 104 ounces, was alive when born at 8.20 am on
27 September, a Sunday, and that my father, Gordon Samuel Honeycombe, was a
merchant, and that his ‘caste’ was European.
There is no mention of my mother.
Our
address, in September 1936, is given as 3 Bath Island Road in the Frere Town
quarter of Karachi. But my memory tells me I was brought up at 4 Bath Island Road. Why we moved from number 3 to number 4 I do
not know. There were four houses, 1, 2,
3 and 4, in that section of Bath
Island Road, which was backed by Clifton Road, and
each house had four flats – two on the ground floor, two on the first
floor. Number 4 Bath Island Road was called Variawa
House. During the war it was the last
house in the road. Beyond it was a flat
and treeless maidan, a marshy plain.
In 1927, when my parents married, my father was living next door to Variawa
House, ie, in number 3, not in number 4.
Presumably my mother joined him
there after their honeymoon, not going to live in number 4 until 1937, after I
was born and after a family holiday we all had in Scotland.
All
the flats were rented. Number 4 was
owned by a Parsee family, who in 1936 lived in the other half of Variawa House. The British occupants of the flats in Bath Island Road
were temporary and mobile – they came and went. They came to Karachi
to work there, and moved elsewhere when they were posted to another part of India or returned to the UK.
My
sister, who was six years older than me, told me that during the first seven
years of her life, from 1930 or so to 1937, she was brought up, not in Variawa
House, number 4, but in the top floor right-hand flat of number 3 as seen from
the front. When she was removed from
her boarding-school in Edinburgh in 1940 and
brought back to India,
she joined the rest of the family in the top left-hand flat of number 4 – the
one I remember – which was beside the right-hand flat of number 3, whose
ground-floor flat was occupied by a family called Maish. From
my point of view, number 4, Variawa House, was always my Indian home.
After
my birth, ‘The True Extract’ of my birth certificate was forwarded to my father
on 8 January 1937. At the bottom of the
True Extract a note was added which said that I was vaccinated by Dr Thomas
Draper on 21 January 1937 -- and presumably circumcised, a Scottish custom (and
a Royal one) about that time. It’s nice
to know I have something in common with Prince Charles and his brothers, not to
mention most Jews and Arabs and up to a third of the male population in the
world.
In reply to a letter from my father to the
Home Office in October 1952 -- for some reason he needed official confirmation at
that time that my place of birth didn’t mean I had Indian or Pakistani
nationality – a Mr Robinson assured him that ‘your son acquired British
nationality at birth by reason of his birth in what was British India and still
retains that status.’ And because my
father was born in the United Kingdom,
wrote Mr Robinson -- and thanks to a certain section of the British Nationality
Act of 1948 -- I automatically became ‘a citizen of the United Kingdom
and Colonies.’
It wasn’t until 1989 that I applied for and
received a copy of my baptismal certificate from the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office. In the India Office’s records
they had a ‘Register of Baptisms in Karachi
in connection with the Church of Scotland, AD 1936’ and this revealed that I
was indeed baptised as Ronald Gordon Honeycombe on 8 November 1936 by a Church
of Scotland chaplain, George MD Short.
Ronald, though a Scottish name, was also
the first name of a famous English film actor of the 1920s and 30s, Ronald
Colman, whom my mother much admired.
Aged 45 in 1936 he had a fine voice and a pencil-line moustache. His first major success was in a silent
film, Beau Geste, in 1927. Two years
later, Bulldog Drummond was the first talkie in which he starred. In 1935 he was in Clive of India and A Tale
of Two Cities, and in Under Two Flags in 1936.
Lost Horizon followed in 1937. I
saw this film when I was a child.
In the baptismal certificate both my
parents’ names were this time noted, my mother’s being given as Dorothy Louise
Honeycombe.
Her maiden name was in fact Dorothy Louise
Reid Fraser, Reid being her mother’s family’s name. She was known as Louie. I have to believe her that I was conceived on
their bedroom floor in Variawa House after a New Year’s Eve fancy dress dance
party in Karachi,
for she added the telling detail – there must have been an Indian carpet on the
floor -- that in the process my father’s knees were grazed.
I was their fourth child. But before proceeding further I should say
where they came from and how they met.
My father was born in the New Town of
Edinburgh, in a flat at Duke
Street, on 23 July 1898, in the last glorious
years of the reign of Queen Victoria. The street was one of several that sloped
downhill from George Street
and had views from top floor rooms, which looked north, of the Firth of Forth
and the low hills of Fife.
About
the time that my father was born, perhaps on that very day, the First Battalion
of the Gordon Highlanders marched along Princes Street, their kilts swinging and
their pipe-band playing, before entraining and embarking for India. Among the cheering crowds was my
grandfather, Henry Honeycombe, and he decided there and then that his new-born
son should be named Gordon, and that his second name should be Samuel, which
was Henry’s father’s first name.
Two years later, on 6 October 1900, a
daughter was born, in a flat in Dublin
Street, Edinburgh,
not far from Duke Street. She was christened Dorothy Henrietta
Honeycombe and was generally known as Donny.
This was because when she was a baby Gordon, who was two, couldn’t
pronounce the ‘r’ in Dorothy and used to say ‘Donny’, which he repeated so
often that the name became the one always used by family and close friends.
My grandparents had, according to my Aunt
Donny, met at a dance in Edinburgh
early in 1897, when Henry Honeycombe was 36 and Mary Spiers was 21. If they met in this way it was probably
because Mary was serving behind a bar, and not one of the dancers. For at the time she was a barmaid. Henry was employed by a large catering
organisation as manager and supervisor of the LNER’s new Pullman dining-cars,
which had recently been introduced on the express trains running from London, King’s Cross, to Edinburgh,
Waverley. After they were married, Mary travelled south
with him on more than one occasion, no doubt much enjoying the excitement of
visiting London – she had probably never been to
England
– and the novel experience of dining on a train. This was something that I would also much
enjoy, especially on that particular east coast route. Before
this Henry had been catering manager of the refreshment rooms at Waverley
Station, and before that he had had a similar job in London
and had been manager of a pub, the Old King’s Head at Hampton Wick, near Hampton Court Palace.
He and Mary were married at St Andrew’s
Episcopal Church in Kelso, a small market town in Roxburghshire, not far from
the English border. The marriage took
place on 15 December 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Mary, one of the younger members of a very
large family, nine of whom survived beyond infancy, was born in Blairgowrie,
Perthshire, where her father was a baker.
At the time of her marriage Mary’s home was in Kelso, where she probably
stayed with an older married sister. Her
father was a ‘Fruit Merchant’ according to the marriage certificate. The certificate also states that Henry was a
‘Manager to Refreshment Caterer’ and that Mary was a barmaid.
When I told my Aunt Donny that this was
the occupation given on the certificate, she emphatically declared, ‘My mother
was never a barmaid!’ But that was how
Mary and Henry may well have met, most likely in the Waverley Hotel in Princes Street,
where Henry must have stayed when he was in Edinburgh.
They couldn’t have met in the vast Royal British Hotel, situated above
the Station, as it didn’t open for business until 1902. It’s now called the Balmoral Hotel. It’s possible that Henry made Mary’s
acquaintance in the late Victorian equivalent of a cocktail bar in the Waverley
Hotel.
She was petite (5 feet 2), full-bosomed
and extremely attractive, with her luxurious dark brown hair fashionably piled
up on her head. Her eyes were blue-grey,
her nose very straight, her eyebrows well-defined and her skin was creamy. She used a touch of face powder but no
rouge. Henry was about 5 feet 7,
well-groomed and sturdily built, verging on being portly, and wore a modest moustache. They called each other Harry and Minnie. They honeymooned in Dublin – a curious choice for a honeymoon in
winter and at Christmas. Perhaps Henry
had some business contacts there.
Their marriage certificate says that Henry was
a ‘Bachelor’. He wasn’t. He had been married before.
He had married his first wife, Ada Lizzie
Phillips, at Paddington in London
in October 1887, when he was 26 and she was 19. In this marriage certificate he is described
as a ‘Licensed Victualler’ – which was also the trade of Lizzie’s father
‘deceased’. Both men managed pubs. It’s likely that Lizzie worked for him as a barmaid
and if so, he married two barmaids. He and Lizzie had a son, Henry George, born at
the Old King’s Head at Hampton Wick in June 1889. Another baby was born prematurely in
Battersea in November 1890. Named
Winifred Ada, she died in March the following year. The marriage ended when Lizzie ran off with a
barman, Henry Cooper. She married him in May 1895 – they were both
27 at the time -- after she and Henry Honeycombe were divorced.
After the divorce, the son of Henry and
Lizzie, Henry George, who was nicknamed Lal according to my aunt, lived with
and was brought up by his mother at 560
Mile End Road in the East End of London, where she
and her second husband, Henry Cooper, ran a pub. When Lal was 10 or 11 he came north once or
twice on holiday and stayed with his father’s new family in Dublin Street in Edinburgh.
But when Henry and his family moved back down south in 1903, to
Wimbledon and then in 1905 to Torquay in Devon,
where Henry managed the St James Hotel, the visits ceased.
Torquay was a fashionable sea-side resort,
with a harbour full of sailing-boats.
Regatta Week, climaxing with a firework display, was one of the
highlights of the summer. Clubs and
societies abounded, as did dances, excursions, garden parties, concerts and all
kinds of social activities that were particularly enjoyed by the affluent middle
classes of the Edwardian age. Queen Victoria had died in
1901 and Edward VII was now king. In
her autobiography, Memories, Donny wrote, ‘Before long my parents became quite
well-known in the town and popular with the local inhabitants, and my mother
told me that the St James Hotel became known, especially among the yachting
fraternity, as the “Beehive” and my mother the “Queen Bee”. Henry Honeycombe joined a swimming club and
participated in diving displays.
The St James Hotel was a three-storey
building situated on the quayside and overlooking the harbour. It was fully licensed and had a bar and restaurant. Mary assisted Henry in the running of the
hotel, supervising the staff, welcoming visitors, and arranging the vases of
fresh flowers that were a feature of most of the rooms. The family had their own apartment within
the hotel and Gordon and his sister, Donny, had a nanny and their own
sitting-room where they had their meals.
Gordon, who was seven in July 1905, was put in a private day school for
boys and girls aged between five and ten.
It was run by two elderly unmarried sisters and was within walking
distance of the hotel. The family were in
Torquay for three years.
Donny wrote that ‘Gordon was a quiet, shy
and rather nervous little boy, whereas I was a tom-boy and always the
ringleader in all our escapades. Gordon
was particular about his appearance – even at such an early age – and hated to
have dirty hands or grubby fingers. He
was also neat and tidy in his bedroom, never leaving books or toys lying around
on the floor when he had finished with them.
I, on the other hand, was untidy in my room and careless of my
appearance. I was full of high spirits
and always up to mischief in one form or another.’ Donny described a party she and Gordon
attended. She wrote, ‘My parents had
made friends with the manager of the Imperial Hotel. This was a most luxurious, expensive and
exclusive hotel set in spacious grounds on the cliff-top half-way between
Torquay and Babbacombe. In December the
manager kindly invited Gordon and me to a children’s Fancy Dress Christmas
Party. My mother dressed Gordon as Sir
Walter Raleigh … When Gordon saw what he had to wear he was miserable … There
were tears in his eyes … He was sensitive and felt he would be a laughing-stock
at the party … I, on the other hand, was dressed as Cigarette, Daughter of the
Regiment, and I loved it.’ When the
time came for the children to assemble for a Grand Parade and their costumes be
judged, Gordon had disappeared. Donny
won a prize.
During the summer he usually wore a
sailor-suit of pale-blue linen and a round sailor hat. In the winter he wore a similar outfit in
navy-blue serge. In wet weather he and Donny had oilskins with
sou-wester hats – black for him and yellow for her. They were taken for walks in the Pleasure Gardens and listened to the band. Sometimes they were taken on a tram-car by
the nanny to play on the sands at Paignton, where there was a Punch and Judy
show. They weren’t allowed to bathe and
had to be content with paddling on the water’s edge. Gordon was happy building sand-castles, and
according to his sister ‘he was very good at it.’ Picnics on Dartmoor
were a special delight. Their father,
Henry Honeycombe, would organise an outing involving ten of twelve adults and their
children and off they would go in a horse-driven shooting-brake, laden with
hampers of food and drink, to enjoy a day on the moors.
Henry was a gourmet, with a liking for
exotic foods and delicacies and expensive wines. Parsimonious otherwise, he gave his wife a
small allowance, out of which she had to provide clothes for herself and her
children, who were given a penny a week as pocket money, although they received
more at Christmas and on their birthdays.
He was also a bit of a disciplinarian, insisting on good manners and
courteous behaviour at all times. In
1907 both Gordon and Donny contracted mild attacks of measles and quickly
recovered. But the following year she
became seriously ill with scarlet fever and was in a sanatorium for six weeks.
A family called the Millers lived in a big
house called Ashfield at the top of Barton
Road. The
father, an American stockbroker, had died in 1901. His English widow, Clara Miller, struggled
to bring up her three children, the youngest being a daughter, Agatha Miller, a
tall girl with long fair hair who was 17 in 1907 and socially very active. Whether she ever encountered any of the
Honeycombes isn’t known. Possibly,
although the Honeycombes were ‘trade’, she might have met them at some
function, perhaps at the St James Hotel.
In October 1912, at a dinner-dance at a stately mansion near Exeter, she met her
future husband, a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, Archie
Christie, and they were married on Christmas Eve, 1914. Agatha Christie’s first crime novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published six years later, by which time Henry
Honeycombe had died, Gordon was in India and Mary Honeycombe and her daughter, Donny,
in Scotland.
Mary Honeycombe had never been
particularly happy in England,
either in Wimbledon or Torquay, and wanted to
return to her native land. So in the
summer of 1908 Henry Honeycombe brought his small family back to Edinburgh, where he took
over the management of the Queen’s Bay Hotel at Joppa, a northern suburb on the
edge of the Firth of Forth.
It was about this time that Gordon’s and
Donny’s grandfather, Samuel Honeycombe came to visit them, travelling up from Kent. Donny, who would be six in October 1908,
wrote in her Memories, ‘It was the first time I can remember meeting him. He
seemed to me, in my young eyes, to be a very old gentleman, of medium height
and broadly built. He was well-dressed,
bald, had side-whiskers and stooped slightly.
He didn’t have much patience with
children.’ He had a gold watch-chain
and watch and a small snuff-box, and when he left Joppa he gave Gordon and
Donny a gold sovereign each.
The following year, 1909, the Honeycombe
marriage seemed likely to fall apart and end in a divorce. Though Donny’s father was, as she wrote,
convivial, jocular, and a good story-teller in male company, he was taciturn
and undemonstrative with his wife, who, according to Donny, found him to be a
hard man, controlling, unsympathetic and cold.
Like his father he was also indifferent to children, even his own, apart
from caring for their welfare. He
rarely displayed any affection for them, and if Donny sought to give him a hug
or a kiss, she would be pushed, albeit gently, aside.
What happened was that Mary Honeycombe,
according to her daughter, had fallen in love with a Scottish engineer, whose
firm was sending him to Australia,
and he wanted her to come with him. But
she decided that she could never leave her children and the crisis passed.
Meanwhile, the children were being
schooled at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, Donny at the Ladies’
College. Both schools were near each
other. The boys’ school was then in Archibald
Place and the girls’ in George Square. Gordon and Donny travelled from Joppa up to
Edinburgh by train, and although central Edinburgh was served by trams hauled
through the streets by cables, they would more than likely have walked up to
the High Street and then on to Lauriston Place and their respective schools. People walked more in those days. Public transport was still something of a
novelty.
Gordon, who was now 10, was a shy, quiet
boy, who didn’t enjoy playing rugby but enjoyed his piano lessons. When
he was older he could play popular tunes from memory, not needing any sheet
music. At Christmas time, in 1909, he and Donny both
had mumps.
In June 1910, a few weeks after the death
of Edward VII, the family moved again, this time to the Queen’s Hotel in Bridge of Allan,
a village north of Stirling made picturesque
by its setting than by its rather plain buildings. Henry
had taken the hotel on a ten-year lease.
It was owned by a widow, Mrs Mary Jane Hawks, and it had been run by her
for 12 years. There was, however, a
dispute to be settled first, over the licensing of the hotel for Sunday
drinking.
At the Licensing Appeal Court held in the County
Buildings in Stirling on Monday, 6 June 1910,
Mrs Hawks and Henry Honeycombe appealed against the Licensing Board’s refusal
to renew or transfer the hotel’s license.
A Miss Annie Smillie had objected to Sunday drinking at the hotel, and
her objection was supported by the Chief Constable. The proceedings were reported at great length
in The Bridge of Allan Gazette.
When Mr Horne, KC, who appeared for Mrs
Hawks and Henry Honeycombe, addressed the Court, he said, according to the
Gazette, that in regard to the proposed new tenant, Mr Honeycombe was very well
acquainted with the trade, and that ‘he did not mean to become tenant with a
six days’ license -- he became tenant on the basis of a seven days’ license,
and the agreement necessarily fell, if only a six days’ license was
granted.’ Mr Horne said that the
Queen’s Hotel had been licensed for 60 years.
It had 23 bedrooms, a considerable business and commercial travellers
frequently stayed. On average, he said,
between 25 and 30 people slept there every week. Mr
Horne commented that ‘very recently there was a call made by an Army official
with regard to finding accommodation in connection with Army
mobilisation.’ An interesting remark,
as the start of the Great War was still four years away.
A petition signed by 447 people against a
Sunday license was not admitted by the Court as it was ‘incompetent’. Nor was the Chief Constable allowed to
produce his witnesses. He remarked
rather sourly and somewhat pointedly that ‘if the same class of men as went to
the Queen’s Hotel went to the Royal Hotel they would not be admitted.’
By a majority of nine votes to six the
appeal was sustained and a Sunday license allowed. The
Court then asked the new tenant, Mr Honeycombe, to ensure that care would be
taken that ‘the class of people complained of were not so freely admitted as
they seemed to have been in the past.’
Mr Horne replied that he had been instructed by Mr Honeycombe to say
that he would do his very best ‘to make the drinking there on Sunday as
reasonable as possible, and to conduct the house in such a way as to entirely
satisfy their honours.’
A Valuation Roll for the County of
Stirling, 1910-1911, lists Mary Jane Hawks, widow, as the Proprietor of the
Queen’s Hotel and notes that she was the ‘hotel-keeper’ of the Osborne Hotel in
Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow – which, being situated in the city’s main
shopping and entertainment area, was probably larger and a lot rowdier than the
Queen’s. Henry Honeycombe, ‘hotel-keeper’,
is listed as the tenant of the Queen’s and its yearly rent is given as £88.
And so, the licensing problem having been
resolved, the Honeycombe family made the move to Bridge of Allan,
a move that would greatly influence the future direction of all their lives.
The village took its name from an old
stone bridge over a small shallow river called the Allan Water, which flowed
southwards past the village towards Stirling. Its main, tree-lined street, where most of
the better-off families lived in large grey-stone houses, was called Henderson Street,
now part of the A9. The Queen’s Hotel
was situated among the shops and stores at the western end of the village not
far from the bridge. A larger hotel,
the Royal, was almost opposite.
Although most people were accustomed to walking everywhere, or
occasionally riding in horse-drawn vehicles and travelling in trains, some motor
cars, owned and driven by wealthy persons, had begun to appear. As a boy, Robert Louis Stevenson had holidayed
in the area, as had Thackeray and Frederic Chopin, both of whom stayed at Keir
House as guests of the Laird. Keir
House was the local stately home, owned and occupied by the Stirling family
since the 15th century, and its 15,000 acres were situated about one
and a half miles northwest of Bridge of Allan.
Another visitor to the area was Charles Dickens, who recovered in Bridge of Allan after one of his reading tours,
staying at the Royal Hotel.
In September 1910, Gordon and Donny resumed
their education at the fee-paying High School in Stirling,
which entailed a three-mile journey there and back by horse-drawn
tram-car. This took about 20
minutes. The tram-cars, with open top
decks, were drawn by two horses. In the
summer single-deck trams were used.
They were long and low and were known as ‘toast-racks’, with adjustable
backs to the seats that could be altered to suit the tram’s direction. The track was a single one, with loop-lines
at certain points to enable trams to pass each other. There were a few small hills on the journey,
and an extra trace-horse would be hitched onto a tram to assist its progress up
the rise. Some bold and hyper-active
children used to jump off the tram and run alongside – a practice not
encouraged by the tram-driver.
Lessons began in the new Primary School at
9.15 am. A two-course lunch, taken on
the premises, cost sixpence. My father
and Donny were less than average students, but in July 1911 Gordon, who was in
Class 3, received a prize for swimming.
A year later, he was one of 14 boys and girls who were given special
prizes for 99 per cent attendance at school.
Dorothy received a Class prize and a prize for Sewing. In July 1914, she received a prize for Bible
Knowledge and Gordon one for Physical Exercises. He also exhibited a palm stand he had made
at the school’s annual exhibition of pupils’ handiwork. Many
of his Honeycombe ancestors had been carpenters. Hundreds of prizes were handed out at the
end of the school year in June, mostly for non-academic achievements. It seems that every pupil in the school
received a heart-warming prize of some sort.
In addition to Class prizes, there were prizes for Dress-making,
Needlework, Book-keeping, Cookery, Laundry Work, Woodwork and Metalwork, for
Singing and Pianoforte, for Writing, Drawing, Painting, Clay-modelling, for
Diligence and Progress.
In the spring of 1911, the children’s
grandfather, Samuel Honeycombe, had travelled north again, this time with his
unmarried daughter, Emma. He was 82 and
Emma was 48. Dorothy described Auntie
Mem, as she was known, as being ‘very small, about five feet tall.’ She had dark curly hair dressed high on her
head and the characteristic small round eyes of the Honeycombes. She wore a long, flowing black dress, with a
very tight bodice, white collar and cuffs.
She much admired Stirling
Castle and the
magnificent views from the battlements, as well as the soldiers in their kilts
and the sound of bagpipes. When taken
to the Wallace Monument she insisted on climbing to the
top.
But within a week of Samuel’s arrival he
became seriously ill. The family’s
doctor, Dr Fraser, who lived further along Henderson Street with his large
family, was summoned and the old man was confined to his room, sufficiently
recovering within two or three weeks to be able to return with Emma to his home
in Gravesend. Perhaps he insisted on going home. For within a few days he died there, of
cystitis, in June 1911.
His son, Henry, and his grandchildren
continued to prosper and flourish in Bridge
of Allan. Teenage Gordon, who was admitted to the Senior School
in Stirling High School in September 1912, now had a
bicycle. In the holidays he went away
to Boy Scout camps. He continued to
have piano lessons. Donny was having singing
and dancing lessons at the school. On
her twelfth birthday she was given a bicycle and at Christmas 1913 a small
wire-haired terrier, whom she called Prince.
The following month, on Friday, 30 January
1914, the all-male Curling Club of Bridge of Allan held its annual dinner at
the Queen’s Hotel. The Bridge of Allan Gazette reported that it was ‘an
excellent dinner, which reflected credit on the purveying of Mr Honeycombe.’ The first toast to be drunk was to the King,
George V, the second to the Queen, the third to the Prince of Wales and other
members of the Royal Family. Other
toasts followed – to the Imperial Forces, to other Curling Clubs, to the
Patronesses, President and Vice-Presidents.
Speeches were made, songs were sung, poems recited, ‘and to the delight
of the company Mr Turnbull in his inimitable style gave “Tam o’ Shanter.”
’ The dinner concluded with the singing
of Auld Lang Syne. There would have
been much drinking and the smoking of cigars, and Henry, the genial host, would
have much enjoyed himself.
In the spring of 1914 teenage Gordon was
ill with bronchitis, but recovered a few weeks later, in time to be among the
many who celebrated an unprecedented event in the village’s history, a royal
visit. This happened on Saturday, 11
July. King George V, Queen Mary and
Princess Mary, who were touring Scotland,
arrived by car in Bridge
of Allan at 12.15,
passing under a triumphal arch bearing a floral crown and the one word,
WELCOME. Red, white and purple drapes,
edged with gold, adorned the arch, which was festooned with evergreens,
Canterbury Bells and sweet-peas. They
then passed by the Queen’s Hotel, through the cheering crowds that lined
Henderson Street, and turned into Well Street, where a Royal Pavilion had been
erected for the official reception and the presentations, all of which were
swiftly dealt with, as was the National Anthem. Within ten minutes the royal party had driven
away. Among the 86 village grandees
occupying seats on the grandstand beside the Pavilion were Dr and Mrs Fraser. Henry Honeycombe and his wife, being trade,
were excluded.
That summer, after the excitement of the
royal visit had faded away,
Gordon
and Donny were out and about on their bicycles, making the most of the school
holidays and the better weather, trekking over the hills and having picnics
with their friends. She wrote, ‘We were
happily enjoying ourselves in this way when one day, suddenly, everything
changed. It was the fourth of August,
1914 – we were at war.’
The Queen’s Hotel and the Royal Hotel were
commandeered by the Army at the start of the war. The Royal accommodated the General Staff and
senior officers, and the top two floors of the Queen’s were occupied by junior
officers and NCOs, leaving the first floor for the Honeycombe family. The bar-lounge and the dining-room remained
open for meals and drinks. Other ranks
encamped in nearby open spaces and fields.
Stirling Castle was the HQ of the Argyll and
Sutherland Highlanders, and the Cameron Highlanders, the KOSBs and the Black
Watch were all quartered in and around the town. Uniformed men and men in kilts were
everywhere.
It was all very exciting for a while, and
the local population did all they could to entertain the troops, with parties,
variety concerts and sporting fixtures.
But then casualty lists began to appear in the newspapers, and those of
the war-wounded who had been hospitalised in Keir House, where Dr Fraser was in
attendance, began appearing in the village, some heavily bandaged and some
without limbs. Village life steadied
and settled into doing what could also be done for the soldiers in France and
elsewhere. Older women formed knitting
groups to knit wearable comforts for the troops, like socks and scarves and
jerseys. Younger women volunteered for
forms of war service that accepted women or joined the Red Cross.
Gordon was a patrol-leader in the Boy
Scouts and he and his best friend, Bill Harris, were selected, among others, to
go north to Nairn, to join other scouts assisting the coastguards to keep watch
and guard the southerly coast-line of the Moray Firth
in the spring of 1915.
His parents and Donny managed to get away
for a two-week holiday in Rothesay on the island of Bute,
which was to the west of the River Clyde and Glasgow. It was their first holiday together, and
their last. They stayed at the large
and luxurious Glenburn Hydro high on a hillside above the town. One morning, on opening The Scotsman, Henry
gasped with horror on reading that an ocean liner, the Lusitania,
on her way from New York to Liverpool,
had been torpedoed by a German submarine on 7 May with the loss of over 1,000
lives.
One
of the reasons for this holiday was that Henry had been off-colour, and
complained of feeling unduly tired. But
once back home at the Queen’s among the military, he continued to play the part
of the hearty, generous host. A heavy
smoker and drinker, he enjoyed his food, cigars and whiskies, and over the next
six months became even more portly. He began to feel not just tired, but unwell,
and conscientiously he made his will on 23 November 1915, three days before he
died.
My Aunt wrote about the Thursday night
before her father died in the first volume of her Memories. She was 15 then and her brother, Gordon, was
17. Both of them were musical, like
their mother, who played the mandolin and belonged to a sextet of local
musicians. Both of the children had
been taught to play the piano, although Donny had soon opted out of that,
preferring to sing and dance.
She wrote, ‘It was bitterly cold, I
remember, and my father, wearing his thick woollen dressing-gown, was sitting
in his armchair in front of a bright coal fire … When Gordon had finished
playing one of his favourite numbers on the piano, my father said to me, “Sing
me one more song, Donny, and then I’m going to bed.” I asked what he would like me to sing and he
replied, “Sing that new song, There’s a long, long trail a-winding. I like it, and you sing it nicely.” So with Gordon at the piano and my mother
playing the mandolin I sang, and when I had finished, he said, “Thank you,
Donny. I enjoyed that.” Then saying he felt a bit tired, he went to
bed.’
He had a heart attack that night and died
the following day, on 26 November 1915, aged 54. He was also suffering from cirrhosis of the
liver and nephritis. His obituary in
the Bridge of Allan Gazette said, ‘He was a bright and cheery personality, of
kindly disposition, and an attractive conversationalist … Since taking up
residence at “The Queen’s” he manifested an intelligent interest in everything
pertaining to the welfare of the village.’
Although Henry left £881-19s-10d in his
Will, he had accumulated a great many debts.
Once these were paid off, further cutbacks had to be made and Donny, now
aged 17, was removed from Stirling
High School. Gordon had already left school when he was
17, in July 1915, and through a friend of his father had obtained employment as
a junior clerk in a merchant company in Glasgow. He travelled there daily by train on a
season ticket. He had done moderately
well at school but was not a brilliant scholar. However, his arithmetic and spelling were
good.
Beset by financial problems, and as the
hotel trade had been much diminished by the war, when it ended Mary Honeycombe
decided not to renew the hotel’s lease.
She was still there, however, in 1920, as the Valuation Roll for
1919-1920 names her as the tenant and hotel-keeper of the Queen’s, which now
had a garage, and whose yearly rent had fallen to £80. Mrs Hawks, now Mrs Robertson, was listed as
the proprietrix, and having given up the Osborne Hotel in Glasgow,
was seemingly back in Bridge
of Allan.
A few doors away from the Queen’s in Henderson Street
was a shop and bakehouse owned by a retired schoolmaster, Thomas
Braidwood. The tenant was a master
baker, William Elder, and it was his son, Billy Elder, whom Mary Honeycombe
married on 24 April 1920. He was also a
baker, as her father had been when she was young (before he became a fruit
merchant). Her second husband was 29, a
solid young man, round-eyed and plain, with a drinking problem, of which she
was as yet unaware. She was 44,
although on the marriage certificate she claimed to be 41.
Back in 1916, some four months after Henry
Honeycombe died, his first-born son, Henry George Honeycombe, who by this time
was 26 and calling himself Harry, not Lal, appeared unexpectedly at the Queen’s
Hotel. He had voyaged from New York
across the dangerous war-torn waters of the Atlantic to see his step-mother,
his half-brother and sister, and to find out whether he had been left anything
in his father’s will.
Of this visit my Aunt wrote, ‘He said he
lived in America, and that when he heard the news of his father’s death –
through some relative of his mother in England – he decided he would come over
to Scotland because, as the eldest son, he thought he might be entitled to some
money or possessions belonging to his father.
My mother told him how much we were in debt, but as he had made such a
long journey she invited him to stay for a few days. This he did and was made welcome. He was a tall, thin, pleasant enough young
man. He wore glasses, and in America had
been an electrical engineer. Before he
left, my mother gave him my father’s gold watch and chain, and a diamond
tie-pin, which had been presented to him as a parting gift from a few friends
when we left Torquay. She also gave him
a sum of money (it could only have been a small amount) as he said he had
barely sufficient for his return fare to America.’
Harry Honeycombe, who was nine years older
than his half-brother, Gordon, probably stayed in Bridge of Allan
for five days, if not for a week, during which it seems he met the Fraser
family at Fernfield. Louie’s oldest
sister, Ada,
was 24 at the time, and their oldest brother, Lovat, was 23. Louie herself was 17, as was Gordon. They would all have been curious to know
what America
and Americans were like, and whether he was married – which he apparently
wasn’t, and why would he lie if he was?
If Harry was in Bridge of Allan in early March, there might have an excursion
to Stirling to see the Castle and also the Wallace Monument. But the weather would not have been
conducive for outdoor activities, for touring, picnics and tennis.
Harry said his goodbyes and boarded the
Tuscania, which had sailed up from Liverpool,
on 17 March 1916. The passenger list of
‘aliens’ notes that his ‘last permanent residence’ was Bridge of Allan,
where he’d been staying with his ‘mother’, Mrs Honeycombe, in the Queen’s
Hotel. He disembarked in New York on the 29th, giving his destination as Philadelphia. Donny wrote, ‘He said he would write and
return the borrowed money as soon as he arrived in America. But we never saw or heard from him
again.’
Although I periodically did some
genealogical research trying to find out what happened to my uncle, Henry George,
I never did. But in 2013, thanks to Peter Calver of www.lostcousins, some answers to Harry
Honeycombe’s apparent disappearance in America -- did he marry? -- did he
have children? – did he enlist in the American army and fight in northern France? – was
he killed there? -- at last emerged.
Calver was also able to establish when Harry first went to America.
A passenger list or manifest proved that
when Harry was 21 he had sailed initially to America
on the SS Merion from Liverpool to Philadelphia,
her regular run, arriving there on 6 April 1910. The one-funnel Merion had been built on
Clydebank, Glasgow,
for the American Line in 1901 and carried 1,700 second class passengers. Breakfast
was at 8.0 am, lunch at 12.30, and dinner at 6.0 or 7.15 Supper was at 9.0 and the bar closed at
11.0. Deck chairs and rugs could be
obtained for four shillings from the Second Steward, and the Purser was able to
exchange one pound sterling for $4.80.
Disguised later on as a decoy battle-cruiser in WW1 the Merion was
torpedoed in the Aegean Sea in May 1915 by a
German submarine and sank.
In April 1910 the ship’s passenger list
noted that Harry Honeycombe was 21.9 and a labourer. His
home town or place of work had been in Hollinwood in Greater Manchester, and
his address before the voyage had been the Bell Hotel in Derby, where he had been staying with F
Phillips – clearly a brother of his mother, Lizzie Cooper, née Lizzie Phillips,
and accordingly his uncle. The
passenger list says that Harry’s final destination in the USA was Pittsburg,
Pennsylvania. He was in America
(as he would tell the Honeycombes) for the next six years, until he returned to
Britain
in 1916.
The Tuscania’s passenger list, dated 17
March 1916, states that Harry’s health was ‘good’, that he had brown hair, blue
eyes and a fair complexion. His place
of birth is correctly given as Hampton Wick in Middlesex. His final destination after the ship docked
in New York was, again, Pittsburg, and his ‘intended future permanent
residence’ is noted as the home of a ‘friend’, RG Reid, who lived at 809 Maple Avenue, Turtle
Creek, PA. Turtle Creek was a township 12 miles
south-east of Pittsburg
and in 1910 it had a population of 5,000 people.
Who was RG Reid and what was his
occupation? The Census Return for Turtle Creek, dated 1
January 1920, tells us that Robert G Reid, aged 46 (he was therefore born in
1874) was living in a mortgaged house in Oak (not Maple) Avenue, Turtle
Creek. It seems that he and his family had recently moved
there from Maple Avenue He was
a sheet metal worker. His wife, Maud,
was two years older than him and they had five children: Nellie, Mary,
Margaret, Phoebe and Robert, who was 9.
The two eldest girls, aged 23 and 22, were clerks. Everyone in the family was able to read and
write. The Census says that Robert Reid
emigrated in 1890 and he was naturalised in 1895. He was born in Canada (in 1874). So he must have emigrated to America from Canada,
not from the UK. His father, the Census says, was Scottish
and his mother Irish.
It
seems more than likely that Robert Reid was related to the Fraser family in Bridge of Allan.
My mother was baptised Dorothy Louise Reid Fraser; her mother’s maiden
name was Christina Reid, and her grandfather was the Rev John Reid. Christina Reid, who was 19 in 1889 when she
married, was born in 1870. Robert Reid
was born in Canada
in 1874. Can it be that his Scottish father was a
brother of the Rev John Reid and that he was therefore a cousin of Mrs Christina
Fraser? Can it be that in 1916 when Harry
Honeycombe met up with the Frasers in Bridge of Allan, he was provided with the
name and address of a cousin of Mrs Fraser, RG Reid, who happened, not only to
be living in America, but not far from Pittsburg?
But what happened after Harry reached
Turtle Creek in 1916? Did the Reids’
domestic situation or work opportunities prove not to his liking? Did he in fact never get to Turtle Creek,
having heard from people he met on the ship or in New York of better job opportunities
elsewhere? For within a few years he
was in Canada.
We
know this because he is named in 1920 in a manifest of persons applying to enter
the USA from Canada. The manifest was drawn up at the so-called Port of Niagara Falls
and is dated 24 October 1920 – this was the point of entry for persons crossing
the border, via the Rainbow Bridge across the Niagara River. It says that Harry Honeycombe, aged 31, a
Canadian and an electrician, who had been residing in Hamilton,
Ontario was heading for Miami
in Florida. And he was not alone. With him were Mary Honeycombe, aged 29, and
Jeanie Honeycombe, aged 8, who were also said to be Canadians and to have been
living in Hamilton. Although Harry is said to be married (M),
Mary is noted as being single (S) – which could be a clerical error. Whether
married or single she told the Niagara
authorities that her surname was Honeycombe, as was that of her daughter.
Four years earlier in Bridge of Allan,
Harry never mentioned the fact that he had a daughter, and a wife. He must have been asked whether he was
married and whether he had any children.
And if he was married, why would he lie? Besides, a dependent wife and child would
have increased his chances of benefiting more largely from the financial
generosity of his step-mother, another Mary Honeycombe.
It seems to me he said nothing about a
wife and child because there were none.
It seems to me more than likely that when he was in Canada during WW1 (and after 1916 – remember he
told the Honeycombes he had been living in America), he met a young widow called
Mary, who had a child, Jeanie, born in January 1911. Mary’s husband had died in Toronto, at 249 Ontario Street, in September 1912,
aged 37. This can only be Thomas Hislop Eaton,
a stonecutter. The parents of Jeanie
Eaton are named in an Ontario
birth register as Thomas Eaton and Mary Clyde, and when Jeanie was born they
were living at 23 Guelph Avenue. They had married in York
County, ie, Toronto, in 1906. Mary is a Scottish name, as are Clyde and Jeanie.
There is no proof, so far, that Mary married Harry. But married or not it seems that they decided
to seek a new life far away from Canada
and thus the move to Florida.
So it transpires that Harry survived the flu
pandemic and never, as far as we know, fought in northern France, leaving Canada
in 1920 and moving down to Miami,
accompanied by Mary and Jeanie Honeycombe.
The last we hear of them is in a
City Directory entry for Miami in 1923, when he
and Mary are listed as living in a houseboat – three years before the hugely
destructive hurricane of 1926 that devastated Miami and in which hundreds died, went
missing and were never seen again. The
houseboat was variously listed, in 1921, 1922 and 1923, as being in the North
Bay Shore drive at the foot of 7th, at the foot of NE 6th
Street, and then between NE 5th and 6th streets. This was virtually in Downtown Miami, over
which the eye of the hurricane passed in the early morning of 18
September. There was a 35 minute lull
when this happened, and many people, unused to the habits of hurricanes, left
their shelters and crowded the streets to inspect the damage. When the eye of the storm moved on with
even more ferocity, accompanied by a ten-foot storm surge, many people were caught
out of doors, were overwhelmed and died.
Had
Harry left Miami
before the hurricane or had he found some alternative accommodation on
land? We do not know. The last record we have of him is that he
and Mary, and presumably Jeanie, were living in a houseboat in Miami in 1923. There we have to leave him, as nothing more is
known, so far, about his life, or death, and return to the life of his
half-brother, my father, and to what happened to him during the First World
War.
Not long after the departure of Harry
Honeycombe from Bridge of Allan, my father left his clerical job in Glasgow when he became 18,
in July 1916, and enlisted in the Army.
I imagine he did so dutifully though reluctantly. He did his training as a cadet with the EUOTC
(Edinburgh University Officers Training Corps) in Edinburgh,
where he stayed in digs and travelled back to Bridge of Allan
at weekends and whenever he could. Joining
the EUOTC was the suggestion of an Edinburgh
lawyer, Mr Ross, to whom Gordon’s mother had written for advice. She dreaded that he might have to serve in
the ranks. She had heard many tales
from officers and men who had returned on leave to Bridge of Allan
about the horrors of war and trench warfare.
She had seen many who had suffered terrible wounds. If Gordon was an officer he would be spared
at least a few of the privations and hardships that had to be endured. As far as he was concerned, being trained as
a cadet was tough enough, and he was glad to get away and travel back to Bridge
of Allan at weekends, wearing his officer cadet uniform and a dashing Glengarry,
which, according to his sister, impressed the village girls, in particular
Milly Duncan and her younger sister, Florence.
Early in 1917 he was commissioned as a 2nd
Lieutenant in an English regiment, not a Scottish one as he had hoped. According to his sister he was displeased –
despite the fact that his father had been English. Perhaps
this fact influenced the posting. The
following week he was posted to the HQ of the KRRC (King’s Royal Rifle Corps)
at Sheerness in Kent,
where he remained for several months.
It was not until the end of the year that he was sent to join his new
Battalion in Salonika, travelling by boat and train right across Europe. His
sister wrote, ‘He was a sensitive boy, hated violence of any kind, and the
thought of using a bayonet filled him with horror.’
2/Lt GS Honeycombe, aged 19, left Southampton on a troopship on 31
December 1917 and reached the KRRC camp near the town of Salonika by 1 February, a journey of 27
days. There he joined the 4th
Battalion. He was in the area for four
and a half months, until 12 June. He
would have been paid 17/6 a day and have received a field allowance of three
shillings a day, totalling 20/6.
Privates were paid six shillings a day, most of which was saved up by
the Army and sent to a designated relative at home.
Salonika (now Thessaloniki)
was a major port in Macedonia
at the head of the Gulf of Salonika, which opened into the Aegean
Sea. Macedonia was the birthplace and
home of Alexander the Great, who had set out in 336 BC to conquer the known
nations of the world. In 1917 a
provincial government of insurgent Greeks, recognised by the Allies, was based
in Salonika, and in that year they had declared war on neighbouring Bulgaria and
forced the abdication of King Constantine.
Bulgaria had allied
itself to Germany. Thus the presence in Macedonia of a large Allied Army,
which included Serbs, Greeks, Italians and Czechs and was primed to resist any
invasion by the Bulgars and the Germans.
The KRRC had been in the area for over a year.
There was more inactivity than action on
this front. Major Alfred Bundy, who
had been in Salonika since October and was based at the Summerhill Camp’s School of Instruction
near Salonika, told his diary in March, ‘Am
getting tired of the humdrum monotony of life here.’
He wrote later, ‘Party of us went to Lake Laganze
today (10 kilometres) to try for some duck that rumour says are so plentiful
here. The Motor Transport people lent
us a lorry and the British Red Cross Society sent us sporting guns and 1000
cartridges. It was great fun … We never
even saw a single duck and the total bag was one emaciated crow.’ He was eventually posted to the front
line. ‘Inspected men. They seemed stale and listless. Some have been here for two years without leave!
… The men play football and cricket on No Man’s Land and the Bulgars never
interfere, so I am told, but the least sign of military training brings shells
over.’ In April he wrote, ‘The days are
getting insufferably hot and with no rain the beautiful flowers and greenery
are all drying up. The Bulgars now use
a searchlight at night and every few minutes they sweep No Man’s Land with it.’
My father had a Collins pocket diary with
him (I have it with me now) in which he noted, in pencil, what he did -- like
battalion drills, route marches, range practice, going on working parties,
attending church parades, being orderly officer, building bivouacs and
fortifying the River Line, the river being the wide Vardar River, to the west
of Salonika. Occasional air-raids and
some shelling are mentioned in the diary, although no one was killed, and the
weather ranged from heavy snow in February to spring and summer torrents of rain
and thunderstorms, and to scorching heat, dust and mud. But there were rest days and weekend
excursions into Salonika. Officers dined at the White Tower
and saw some shows at the French Club, where girls and champagne abounded. ‘SOME
EVENING’ Gordon wrote of one riotous night.
There were also cross-country runs, boxing contests, football games,
Brigade and Divisional Games, in which he took part, winning the 100 yards
dash. Now and then the officers went
out hunting wild pigs and duck-shooting.
He noted, ‘Swallows build nest in our mess. Storks on roof, also crows.’
In a page headed Personal Memoranda he
enters, in ink, his watch number, his revolver number, his compass number, his
bank pass-book number and the telephone number of the Queen’s Hotel, as well as
its Telegraphic Address. His glove size
was 8; his collar size 16; his hat size 7⅓ ; his boot size 9; and he weighed
11 stones 10 lbs. He doesn’t give his
height. But his sister says in her
Memories that he was 5ft 8ins. Her
birthday, 6 October, is noted, as well as the arrival of a letter from Donny
and one from a girl called Norah Stewart.
In June there was a change of
command. The French General commanding
the Allies was replaced by another more fiery French General, who told his
troops on his arrival, ‘I expect from you savage vigour.’ As a
result, the Allies opposing the Bulgars and Germans went on the offensive in
September, with disastrous results. In
the Battle of Doiran 165 officers were killed and injured and over 3,000 other
ranks. On 25 September Bulgaria called
for a truce, and an armistice, predating by six weeks the German one in
November, was signed a few days later.
My
father was not involved in the September offensive and the ensuing
slaughter. His Battalion had been ordered
on 11 June to proceed to the killing fields of Northern
France. It left Salonika on the 12th. After
a long and tiring journey lasting over a month, travelling on foot, on lorries,
by trains and boats, the Battalion reached Serqueux in Upper Normandy, 30 miles
southeast of Dieppe. A few days later, on 15 July, the
Battalion’s officers and men moved to Martin-Eglise, a few miles from Dieppe.
Two weeks before this move my father
became ill with influenza and a chest infection and was hospitalised on 4
July. If this bout of flu was what became known as
the Spanish Flu, he was lucky to survive.
It was believed to have originated in April in Spain, where
occurred the first major European outbreak of the disease. Its first appearance was, however, in the
spring of 1918, in Kansas in the USA, and over
the next two years it killed over 675,000 Americans. Among them might have been Gordon’s
half-brother, Harry, who was heading for Philadelphia
when he returned to the USA. That city was one of the worst to be
affected in America. But
Harry, even if he became ill, survived.
World-wide some 500 million people
were infected, of whom more than 50 million died. Most were young adults, between the ages of
20 and 40. The most devastating
pandemic in recorded history, it killed more people than all those who died in
the Great War. In Britain some
250,000 people died.
Luck was with my father in 1918. Having missed the slaughter of the September
offensive against the Bulgarians, and having recovered from an attack of non-fatal
flu, by chance he then missed the final offensives against the Germans in France. As it
was, he was discharged from hospital after four days, on 8 July, and spent a
few pleasurable days in Paris. He then rejoined the Battalion and was once
again caught up in the physically demanding drudgery of route marches, parades
and drills.
On his 20th birthday, 23 July,
a Tuesday, he noted, ‘My birthday.
Weather awful. Very heavy showers of rain. Lecture
in afternoon by Brigadier on Defence.’ There were enjoyable excursions into Dieppe, a highlight being
a Divisional Horse Show at Dieppe Racecourse on a Sunday after church
parade. He wrote, ‘Thousands of people
present including soldiers & civilians.
Hotel Metropole in evening.
Drove home by car (Some night).’
Towards the end of August he was ill
again, with a bronchial infection and a very high temperature, and this time he
was given 14 days sick leave. It took
him three days to get back to Bridge
of Allan.
His sister wrote in her Memories, ‘Gordon
looked tired on his arrival, and had obviously lost weight. But he still managed to look immaculate in
his khaki uniform with its Sam Browne belt … He told us he had applied for a
transfer to the RFC (Royal Flying Corps). He
liked the idea of flying and thought that aerial combat would be preferable to
foot-slogging and trench warfare.’ In
fact the RFC and the RNAS (Royal Naval Air Service) had been amalgamated and
officially became the Royal Air Force in April 1918. The RAF’s HQ was in part of the
requisitioned and vast (800-room) Hotel Cecil situated between the Embankment
and the Strand.
He went to a local variety show to see his
sister perform with three other girls in their Pierrot Troupe and sought out
several of his school-friends. He also
called on Dr Fraser and his family.
The previous year, the Frasers’ eldest
son, Lt Lovat Fraser, aged 24, who had been with the Machine Gun Corps in France,
had been shot through the head by a German sniper, on 12 February 1917. An obituary in The Bridge of Allan Gazette
said that Lovat was ‘an architect in Edinburgh
when war broke out, and enlisted in the Lovat Scouts, afterwards getting a
commission in the Cameron Highlanders before transferring to the Machine Gun
Corps. He had seen considerable
service, and was a fine-looking soldier in the kilt, being a handsome young
fellow, 6ft 2in in height. A kindly
lad, Lovat was very popular with everybody who knew him.’ On the tall dark family gravestone in Logie Cemetery
is written, ‘He died the noblest death a man may die, fighting for God &
Right & Liberty.’
All five of Lovat’s younger brothers and
his three younger sisters were still living in Fernfield, a large house on Henderson Street
with a long, large garden at the rear.
One of the girls was my mother, Louie Fraser, aged 20, the same age as
Gordon. They met on several occasions
while his leave lasted. But on
Thursday, 12 September 1918 he had to return to the war. The last entry in his pocket diary says,
‘Left Stirling 3.53 pm en route for FRANCE.’ All the ensuing pages are blank. He may have thought he would never return.
Knowing from the newspapers what dangers
and horrors faced him, his mother wept and wailed, ‘Oh, Gordon, I don’t want
you to go! I can’t bear to let you
go!’ A car was waiting for him outside
the Queen’s Hotel and after giving his mother and sister a hasty kiss he said,
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be back all right,’
and hurried away.
He rejoined his Battalion in France on 14
September. Although the first attack made by the
Battalion on the German lines didn’t occur until 3 October, the Battalion War
Records of the KRRC indicate there was much toing and froing before that. ‘On
September 16th we entrained at Dieppe
station at 7.30 am and went into billets at Beaudricourt near Lens’ -- 18 miles
west of Arras. ‘The next day we received orders to move to
the 4th Army Area; we paraded in fighting order in the afternoon,
and moved by road to Bertangles, and after remaining there until 28th,
we again travelled to Armes, Albert, Mametz and Moislains; here we found the
roads were blocked with traffic, and we finally pulled up at about 10 pm at a
wood one and a quarter miles southwest of Nurlu; here we bivouacked for the
night … On the 29th the future was obviously uncertain, as we
frequently received orders to move forward, which were all cancelled … Our
strength by September 30th was 47 officers and 952 other ranks.’
My father would have been a Platoon
Commander. Three platoons, each of
about 30 men led by a junior officer, constituted a Company, which was led by a
Company Commander, usually a Captain.
Every officer would also have had a batman, whom officers in WW1 called
‘my servant’. A batman would have been
an ordinary soldier, a private, usually chosen by an officer from the soldiers
in his Company. He would have looked
after the officer, seeing to his personal needs, his meals, uniform and
equipment, doing any washing and cleaning that was possible, delivering
messages and driving the officer’s vehicle, if he had one, or tending to his
horse. In some case the two men formed
strong relationships, and sometimes they fought, and died, together.
The official history of WW1 says that ‘the
final phase of the War on the Western Front’ began on 26 September and ended on
11 November. It says, ‘In these seven
weeks, the greatest advance of the War in breadth and depth was achieved. For the first time in the War all the Allied
Armies on the Western Front, from the Meuse to the sea, were on the move
together, and they continued advancing, with short intermissions, either
attacking or pursuing, until the end … (The enemy) was attacked everywhere at
once, was forced to disperse his reserves, and, although the Allied margin of
numerical superiority was not very great, he was, in the result, nowhere strong
enough to hold his ground.’
At dawn on 3 October the Battalion took
part in one of the last offensives, having been allotted the task of clearing
the villages of Le Catelet and Gouy on the River Escaut, about ten miles north
of St Quentin, which was about 27 miles south of Cambrai. Assisted by an English Brigade on the left
and Australian infantry on the right, they attacked the German trenches and
machine-gun posts. As no reconnaissance
had been possible the previous night and as no guides were available, losses
were heavy. It also rained. Units
became disorganised and scattered in the bitter fighting that ensued, while
small groups of men tried to hold a line 2,000 yards long on the northern side
of Le Catelet, helped in part by artillery fire.
In
the evening the KRRC were relieved and withdrew a few miles southwards to the village of Bony in the Hindenburg line. Three
officers were killed and six wounded in this action and there were many casualties
among the soldiery. Nonetheless they
captured one German officer, 252 other ranks and 35 machine guns. It was the first bloody action in which my
father was involved. Armed only with a
revolver, officers were supposed to lead their platoons and companies into
battle, into a hail of bullets and the slicing shrapnel of exploding shells. Face to face with the enemy there was no
choice, unless the enemy surrendered – it was kill or be killed.
At dusk on 4 October the KRRC attacked
again, as ordered, their objective this time being a line of fortified enemy
positions on high ground on the other side of the Escaut River. The attack was launched with such energy and
speed that all the positions were taken and held. The Germans that were not killed or captured
fled. This time the KRRC casualties
were slight. Four days later, on 8
October, a third attack on machine-gun posts dug in around a farm was
less successful, although one German officer, 111 other ranks and 49 machine
guns were captured. Among the KRRC an
officer, Lt Preece, was killed, as well as 12 other ranks. Two officers and 40 other ranks were
wounded.
Corporal Jame Murrell of the 2/4th
York and
Lancasters, who was in the area, wrote about ‘the big push’ in a letter to his
parents. He said, ‘I have been in the
the thick of the fighting from the commencement … It has been a hard task of
endurance as well as the fighting and really wants a strong will to carry one
through it all, but thank God we are made of the right stuff. Jerry is now beginning to realise that we
are the master, and before many more weeks he will cry out for mercy, just now
it is hell upon earth for him … The prisoners we take are a very dejected lot
and are absolutely fed up with it, they say down with the Kaiser … We were
ordered to take a village which we took easily with very small losses, but when
we got through that village we were held up by an enemy machine-gun which was
knocking our boys out wholesale, so I at once volunteered to go forward on my
own and capture it, which I did, killing the five Jerrys that were working the
gun.’ Off one of them he took an iron
cross, ‘2nd class’, as a souvenir.
2nd Lieutenant Clifford Carter,
who was also with the York and Lancasters, was involved in an attack on 17
October, part of an offensive that included among its targets the village of Le
Cateau, which was several miles to the southeast of the gaunt, burning ruins of
Cambrai, where Third Army patrols from the south had met up with Canadian
forces entering the town from the north on 9 October.
In his diary Carter wrote, ‘Attacked at 7
a.m … I was in charge of 9 Platoon, C Company.
We took up our position at the edge of a wood at 6 a.m. There was a dense fog and we had no idea who
or what was in front of us. We had to
rely entirely on map-reading and compasses.
Promptly at 7 our bombardment started up and the guns put up a perfect
barrage – a real wall of fire – just ahead.
It was too near to be pleasant and we had to lie flat with our faces in
the grass. After a few minutes the
barrage advanced 100 yards and we were just preparing to follow it when a great
shout went up from behind and three tanks came lumbering out of the wood. We dashed after them seeing nothing but fog,
fog, fog and not knowing when we should come across the enemy. But the guns had done their work and only a
few Germans popped up here and there out of shell-holes and dugouts. If they seemed prepared to put up a fight
our fellows gave them three rounds “rapid” – most of them just put up their
hands and surrendered, crying “Kamerad”.
We soon collected a score or so and after depriving them of bayonets,
knives and so forth, I sent them marching off with an NCO and two men.’ Carter deprived a captured German officer of
his field-glasses and iron-pointed stick ‘as mementos of the occasion.’
The KRRC were involved in the fighting in
that area on the 17th and 18th of October. Aided by other battalions and an American
force, the KRRC succeeded in crossing the River Selle under heavy fire and in
dense fog. They pushed on, captured a railway embankment
and advanced across open country pitted with German machine-gun nests. Seven officers with the KRRC and 117 other
ranks were killed or injured. 110
Germans, two field guns and many machine-guns were captured.
My father must have wondered how long his
luck would last and whether he would survive the war, which the soldiery on
both sides knew was coming to an end.
Rumours of an Armistice were being spread around and many of the
combatants were now especially fearful of being seriously wounded, of being maimed,
gassed and blinded, or being unluckily killed in the last few weeks of the war
– as many were, including the war poet, 2nd Lieutenant Wilfred Owen,
shot in the head by a sniper on the morning of 4 November during the crossing
of the Sambre-Oise Canal near the village of Ors.
But on 19 October the KRRC withdrew and
moved into billets at Avelu, where they remained for 10 days, better fed and
rested, but with no let-up in parades and drills, lectures and kit inspections. Here they were inspected and congratulated
by a succession of bluff and beribboned Brigade, Divisional and Corps Commanders. Then reinforcements arrived, and on 30
October the KRRC was sent for the last time into battle. The Battalion moved off to Le Cateau for a
final series of attacks, some of which were in heavy rain and under an enemy
bombardment, and in which eight officers and 173 other ranks would be killed or
wounded, including five 2nd Lieutenants.
But 2nd Lieutenant GS Honeycombe was not
among them. As the Battalion paraded
before marching off to Le Cateau, he was told to fall out and report to the Battalion
Office. He did so and learned that his
transfer to the RAF had come through that very day. His orders were to report forthwith to the
War Office in London.
In Bridge of Allan
a small brown envelope that usually brought bad tidings was opened by his
fearful sister. It said that Gordon was
in London and
would be home the following day. At the
RAF HQ in the Hotel Cecil he had been interviewed and then sent home to await
further instructions.
His sister thought he looked extremely tired,
pale and very thin when he arrived at the Queen’s Hotel. He said he had felt quite bewildered as he
watched his Battalion march away to the next offensive. It seemed a providential escape – he might
have been among the eight officers who were killed. And
his story, and mine, would never have been written.
Then, after seven or eight days,
instructions arrived recalling him to London for another interview at the Hotel
Cecil, where he was told to go away yet again, to take seven days leave and
await instructions. And so it happened that when he returned again
to London it
was on Monday, 11 November 1918, the day the Armistice became official – on the
11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Depending on where they were and on what they
were doing at the time, the news of the Armistice was received very differently
by the Allied combatants, by the officers and the men. Some rejoiced; some were sad and
silent. Lt Dixon of the 53rd
Brigade, Royal Garrison Artillery, was on a leave ship crossing the Channel,
and as they entered Folkestone’s harbour he was taken aback by the blasting of
ships’ sirens and the cheering and waving of their crews. ‘The bloody war’s over!’ he said to a
friend, adding thoughtfully, ‘I now have a future.’ ‘Yes,’ the other man, a Captain, replied. ‘And so have I. I wonder what we’ll do with it, and what it
will be like.’ Dixon looked
back across the Channel at the distant unseen coast of France,
shrouded with clouds and rain, and remembered the thousands of men who had no
future, and what those who had survived the war had left behind.
He wrote, ‘No more slaughter, no more
maiming, no more mud and blood, and no more killing and disembowelling of
horses and mules … No more of those hopeless dawns with the rain chilling the
spirits, no more crouching in inadequate dugouts scooped out of trench walls,
no more dodging of snipers’ bullets, no more of that terrible shell-fire. No more shovelling up bits of men’s bodies
and dumping them into sandbags; no more cries of “Stretcher-bear-ERS!” and no
more of those beastly gas-masks and the odious smell of pear-drops which was
deadly to the lungs, and no more writing of those dreadfully difficult letters
to the next-of-kin of the dead. There
was silence along the miles and miles of the thundering battle-fronts from the
North Sea to the borders of Switzerland
… The whole vast business of the war was finished. It was over.’
In France,
in a trench at the Front, Private Arthur Wrench of the 51st (Highland) Division,
remembered the death of his younger brother, Bill, killed a year ago. In his diary he wrote, ‘I wonder what thanks
he’ll get, and we who survive too.’
Where Wrench was dug in, the Armistice was greeted with ‘a riot of
enthusiasm.’ He wrote, ‘It is
pandemonium and I am sure we must all be mad.’
He added, ‘While we are letting ourselves get loose it is certain that
each one of us has time to give a thought of regret for our late pals who have
“gone west” and have not been spared to go mad like us. It is yet to be seen whether the price they
have paid will be in vain or will be truly honoured and appreciated.’ He concluded, ‘I think it is quite hopeless
to describe what today means to us all.
We who will return to tell people what war really is surely hope that
11am this day will be of great significance to generations to come.’
My father never spoke of what he had done
and where he had been in the war, and I never asked him about it. I never knew that he had been in Salonika and
France
until, years later when I was a teenager, my Aunt Donny told me. But self-absorbed as I was, I wasn’t
interested – it was all so long ago.
In London
on Armistice Day it was cold and wet.
The Times said, ‘The
unceasing
drizzle was powerless to dampen the high spirits of the people … The air was
full of the intoxicating spirit of joy.’
Theatres were packed, with audiences everywhere ‘a-quiver with half
suppressed feeling, and ready to give it vent as fully and as often as they
could.’ They loudly sang the national
anthem and gave three cheers for the King.
A Londoner, Fred Robinson, wrote in his
diary, ‘A day never to be forgotten! … Practically all work was suspended, and
the streets became packed with people, including great numbers of soldiers on
leave and thousands in hospital blue – most of these, accompanbied by their
lady friends, shouted themselves hoarse and waved flags, made many loud noises
on improvised instruments. Others danced informal quadrilles. All was one vast pandemonium … In the Mall
was an exhibition of hundreds of cannon captured from the enemy which formed a
very appropriate background to the crowds here assembled. In front of Buckingham Place was one vast
flock of people, many of whom had found positions of advantage on Queen
Victoria’s monument just opposite, and when the King and Queen appeared from
time to time on the balcony of the Palace, the enthusiasm simply knew no bounds
… As darkness drew on it was realised that the lighting regulations had been withdrawn,
and though there had not been time to clean the black shading off most of the
street lamps, this had been done in many cases, and the streets, particularly
Piccadilly, were comparatively well lighted.
The clubs and hotels had their outside lights on and their blinds up,
which added to the general brightness.
Passing the Houses of Parliament on our way home, we saw the great clock
once more illuminated and heard the thundering tones of Big Ben reverberating
the great fact of peace.’
In London
that night my father celebrated with other young officers by going to see Oscar
Asche in Chu Chin Chow in His Majesty’s Theatre. A musical fantasy, its large cast included a
camel, a donkey, poultry and a chorus of scantily clad slave girls. Joyful
and riotous celebrations continued in London
on 12 November and Gordon and some friends went to see Phyllis
Monckton in Tails Up at the Comedy Theatre.
The next day he returned home by train to Bridge of Allan. I imagine he slept most of the way.
It
was not until the summer of 1919 that my father was demobilised. This was not unusual, and the months of
delay before surviving combatants were relieved from their military duties and
allowed to resume their civilian lives caused a good deal of grumbling,
resentment and active protest. The
KRRC returned to garrison duties in India. Their losses had been great – 12,800
officers and men had been killed. Seven
had been awarded a Victoria Cross.
Gordon came home for a rest and a holiday
before resuming his pre-war clerical employment at William Graham & Company
in Glasgow. His sister wrote, ‘He was keen to get on and
do well, and he was always painstaking in any work he had to do.’
But by the summer of 1919 his wartime
experiences were having a delayed traumatic effect. ‘His nerves were on edge, and he jumped at
every sound,’ wrote his sister. ‘He had
nightmares and cried out in his sleep, and he couldn’t sit still for five
minutes.’ Dr Fraser, the family doctor,
was sent for and diagnosed rheumatic fever.
My Aunt wrote, ‘He considered that the strain of the war was largely
responsible for this illness. Nervous
tension, exposure in the trenches in all kinds of weather and long marches in
the hot sun had overtaxed Gordon’s strength.’
Gradually his health was restored and he
returned to his desk job at Graham’s offices in Glasgow.
In October 1919 he was offered a job as
an assistant manager in Graham’s overseas branch in India,
in Bombay. He was now 21 and the prospect of working
abroad excited him. At the end of
November he sailed from Liverpool to Bombay,
taking with him a large new cabin trunk containing a topee and tropical
outfits, which were needed for his new life in India. His mother and sister travelled by train to
Liverpool to see him off, and the night before his departure he took them to a
very smart restaurant where, when asked by a waiter if they had a favourite
melody the three-piece band might play for them, he chose Peaches down in
Georgia, which had, it seems, some personal associations. Perhaps these were of the French girls in
Salonika, or the girls he met in Paris and Dieppe.
His mother, Mary, and his sister, Donny,
said goodbye to him back at the hotel.
They were not to see him again for five years.
Several months later, in Bridge of Allan,
they would have read in the Stirling Journal of Thursday, 8 July 1920 about ‘a
pretty wedding’ in the parish church, on the Wednesday at 2.0 pm. They were probably not among the guests. The bride was Dr Fraser’s second daughter,
Madge, aged 25. The groom was Robert
Dundas Duncan, eldest son of John Duncan of Kirkmay, Crail, in Fife. The bride
‘wore a dress of white charmeuse, trimmed with gold brocade, with a wreath of
orange blossom, tulle veil, and carried a bouquet of pink roses.’ Cecil Duncan ‘acted as groomsman to his
brother, while the bride was attended by her youngest sister, Miss Dorothy
Louisa Fraser … A reception was held in Fernfield after the ceremony. The happy couple left per motor for the
north, where the honeymoon will be spent.’
Just over two years later, on 21 September
1921, the Stirling Journal reported that Dr Fraser had been presented with the
‘Medaille du Roi Albert’ at a ceremony in Glasgow, ‘in recognition of the
valuable services he rendered to Belgian soldiers during the war’ – they had
been hospitalised in Keir House, which had been utilised as a hospital for the
war-wounded. Decorations were also
bestowed on other guests. Before the
ceremony, the guests, who included Mrs Fraser, were taken on a trip downriver
on the turbine steamer, Duchess of Argyll, as far as Loch Goil. They then had lunch.
Nothing is known of my father’s life in Bombay, except that he had a horse called
Billy. None of his letters has
survived. He did well in Bombay, but
after a year or so had passed, when an opportunity arrived in 1921, through a
friend, for him to move to the less hot and humid climes of Karachi and be paid
a higher salary, he left Graham’s and travelled by a coastal steamer up to
Karachi, where he joined the Vacuum Oil Company of America. The company later on merged with the
Standard Oil Company in 1931, becoming the Standard Vacuum Oil Company, until
it changed its name again, in 1955, to the Socony Mobil Oil Company. It is now part of Exxon Mobil.
Gordon was an assistant sales manager,
supervising the work of the Indian clerks.
Most of his Standard Vac colleagues were American, like Orlo Bond, Bob
Markley and Bill Van Dusen. He lived in
what was known as a chummery, a house where several young bachelors lived
together.
Two photos of him exist taken in the
mid-1920s on a beach at Sandspit near Karachi. He is with a group of nine adults and two
children. Most are wearing topees and
the men shirts and trousers. One has a
jacket and tie. Gordon seems to be the
only one wearing shorts. His legs are skinny. Among
the others are a couple called Dick and Sybil Pollard and a man called Cyril
Beaty. In those days Gordon was known
as Honey, and Honey is the caption below another happy photo of him on a golf
course, wearing a topee, shirt and shorts.
It was not until he had been with the
company in Karachi
for two years that he was granted, as was customary, an extended period of
leave. Meanwhile, he wrote home
regularly and sent his sister and mother (now Mrs Billy Elder) some exotic
Indian gifts. By this time the Elders,
and Donny, were living in a flat conversion on the ground floor of a house
called Birnock at the far end of Henderson
Street, beyond Fernfield.
In March 1925 Gordon was back in Bridge of Allan, sun-tanned and rested after a
three-week voyage.
Now aged 26, he was fit and well, and his
sister thought what ‘an extremely good-looking young man he was, with his
thick, black and glossy hair, and his blue eyes, which seemed more blue than
ever against the sun tan of his skin.’
Before the war she had commented on his ‘very white teeth and an attractive
smile’ and the fact that he ‘was well built and carried himself well’ and had
many admirers, ‘especially among the girls.’
A week after his arrival he was at the
first night of the Bridge
of Allan Operatic Society’s
production of The Yeomen of the Guard, staged in the Museum Hall. He went to the last night as well. His sister, Donny, now 24, had the leading
role of Elsie Maynard. She had already
performed in several other amateur productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
operettas, like The Gondoliers and The Mikado, always playing the female
lead. She had been having singing
lessons once a week in Glasgow,
and emboldened by her stage successes and the unhappy domestic situation at
Birnock, where Billy Elder was drinking heavily and neglecting his business,
she had decided to leave home. She had
been earning a pittance in a stuffy solicitor’s office in Stirling,
book-keeping and typing, but now resolved to abandon the job, and Bridge of
Allan, and try to get into the D’Oyly Carte Company in London as a professional
singer and sing in the Gilbert and Sullivan operattas.
When Gordon told her he was being sent by
Vacuum Oil to New York on a special training course and that he would be
working in the company’s London offices for two weeks before that, she decided
to go with him to London, ostensibly for a holiday, and come what may, not to
return to Bridge of Allan.
Meanwhile, he was enjoying his leave in Bridge of Allan, playing golf and renewing old
acquaintances, and seeing some girl-friends, like Milly and Florence Duncan –
and Louie Fraser. His piano-playing of
romantic ballads, Scottish songs and dance tunes would have entertained them
and their parents at various social gatherings. He was
much in demand for parties and dances and no doubt became even more popular
when he bought a second-hand Morris Ten car for £50, and with favoured
girl-friends, or his mother and sister, motored around the countryside in the
spring of 1925, touring the Trossachs, and, sometimes with the hood down, going
as far as Perth, Crieff and the Borders.
More often than not his companion on these excursions was Louie Fraser,
Doctor Fraser’s youngest daughter.
They were virtually the same age – he was
almost three weeks older, having been born on 23 July 1898 and she on 9 August,
the sixth of Dr Fraser’s ten children – and both became 27 in the summer of
1925. Although she played tennis and
would become a reasonable golfer in India, she wasn’t particularly
musical, despite the fact that her mother was a talented pianist. It seems she never learned to play the
piano. Nor did her two older sisters. She preferred more solitary, lady-like
pursuits like gardening, needlework, drawing and painting. On the other hand she was lively, extrovert
and outspoken and liked to have fun. She
was merry and carefree and laughed a lot.
She and Gordon must have been the most handsome and outgoing couple in
the village.
The Frasers’ house at Fernfield had a very
long secluded, luxuriant garden at the rear set with large ornamental vases. They
had a gardener, and as they were such a large family they had several servants
indoors. There was no need for a
doctor’s daughter to do any housework and cook – as Mary Elder now had to do at
Birnock. In Memories my Aunt wrote,
‘Louie was a strikingly good-looking girl, tall, with black hair which she
pleated and coiled around her ears like earphones. She had brown eyes, good features, and a
flamboyant style of dressing that was eye-catching.’
A Mrs Ella MacLean who wrote to me in 1979
from Bridge of Allan said, ‘Fernfield is only three
houses east of my own home, so your Mother passed by almost daily. How I admired her! She was tall, and very pretty. She always dressed in such an attractive
feminine way – bright like herself.’
She
was in fact an inch taller than my father.
Her two older sisters were also
tall and all her brothers were six-footers.
The family had moved into Fernfield about 1900. Previously they had lived in Bridge of Allan in a house called Bellfield, where
Louie was born. Her father is described
in the birth certificate as ‘Medical Practitioner’, ie, a GP. Her mother was a tall handsome woman who
wore her hair on top of her head, as was the fashion. She was the daughter of a much respected
local minister, John Reid, known as Honest John, and Margaret Buchanan Reid,
nee Wilson. Christened as Christina Brown Reid, she
lived at her father’s manse, and was 19 when she married John Hossack Fraser,
MB, at the parish church in Bridge
of Allan on 20 November
1889. He was 32, one of five children,
and was born on 5 August 1857 in Inverness. No doubt her father, John Reid, was the
officiating minister at the marriage.
My mother would later extol her Scottish
origins and the fact that she was a doctor’s daughter and a Fraser, whereas the
Honeycombes were not only English but presumably bee-keepers and had been
tradesmen if not actually peasants.
Gordon’s father had been a publican after all and was involved in catering
before becoming manager of a hotel which he didn’t actually own. I don’t think she can ever have known,
fortunately, that Gordon’s mother had been a barmaid – she never mentioned this. She
also claimed that the best English was spoken in the Inverness
area, and indeed she never had a Scottish accent. Nor did my father, who was
half-English. And nor did I.
Dr John Hossack Fraser was the middle
child of five children, four of whom were boys. He was born on 5 August 1857. For a time he was the Resident Physician in
the University Clinical Wards of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and then the
House Surgeon at Lancaster Infirmary.
He sailed around the world as a ship’s surgeon for P & O before
settling down as a physician in Bridge
of Allan in 1890, at the
time of his marriage to Christina Reid.
The youngest of his brothers, Charles
Fraser, was born on 10 August 1873 in Inverness
– a long time after the other boys, who were born in 1855, 57 and 59. He had a go at being an actor and used to
entertain the Fraser children in Fernfield with dramatic renderings of speeches
from Shakespeare’s plays. Louie’s Uncle
Charles was, however, apparently unable to sustain a career as an actor, as
later on he became manager of the Picture House at 140 Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow – it was opened in 1910 and had a Palm Court and a
Wurlitzer Organ -- and then the manager of a dance hall and restaurant in Newcastle.
The father of Dr Fraser and his three
brothers was James Fraser, Junior, who was born about 1819 in Nigg,
Ross-shire. He was an ironmonger at the
time of his marriage to Isabella Hossack of Dingwall in January 1852, when he
was about 33 and she 21. Nigg and
Dingwall are both north of Inverness, and
about 15 miles away from the town. He
later described himself as a merchant and also as an iron merchant. Why he was called James Fraser, Junior,
isn’t clear, as his father was an Alexander.
Perhaps there was an unknown uncle called James.
James Fraser Junior was living at Castle Street in Inverness in 1856.
As its name suggests the street was beside and below the red-stone
castle that had been rebuilt in 1836. Described as an ironmonger he was declared
bankrupt and then discharged from bankruptcy three years later. It seems he overstretched himself by acquiring
a house and property called Bellevue, west of Inverness. But
his financial situation and prospects must have improved as at some point he
and his family moved to Edinburgh. The Census of 1881 shows them to be living
at 18 Lonsdale Terrace on the north side of a wide treeless, grassy area called
the Meadows. He was now said to be a
wine and spirit agent and to be aged 62.
Isabella, his wife, was 51, and two of his sons, John Hossack and
William Donald, were studying medicine, presumably at Edinburgh University. The youngest, Charles, was seven. William Donald later moved to London.
James Fraser, no longer called Junior, and
now said to be a commercial traveller, died at 25 Warrender Park Terrace, on
the south side of the Meadows, on 4 April 1890. Aged 71 he died of jaundice from enlargement
of his liver, due to cirrhosis, and mitral disease of the heart (the mitral
valve was leaking blood). His son,
Charles, was present at his father’s death.
Having moved to Glasgow,
Charles was not present at his mother’s death and was merely the
informant.
Charles’s mother, Isabella Fraser, died, aged
88, in December 1916 in a flat in Roseburn
Gardens, a run-down
tenement building near the Water of Leith in Murrayfield. The cause
of death was given as ‘Constipation, slight catarrhal jaundice, retching and
consequent exhaustion in an aged and feeble woman.’ It took her 12 days to die.
James Fraser Junior’s father, Alexander
Fraser, was a farmer at Nigg in Ross and Cromarty. The farm
was called Westfield. In the Census for 1841 he is said to be 50 –
which means he was born about 1791. His
wife, Janet, was 45 and two offspring were in the house – Alexander, aged 15
and Ann, aged 11 – as well as a 20-year-old servant, Janet Ross. The surname of Alexander’s wife is believed
to have been Robertson. It appears as
such on James Junior’s death certificate.
No record of the marriage of Alexander and Janet has been found.
And that’s all I’ve been able to unearth
about my mother’s ancestors.
My father’s ancestors are chronicled in
the Honeycombe Archive on the Internet, on www.honeycombe-archive.com. Suffice it here to say that his
grandfather, Samuel, had been a carpenter and undertaker and later on the
Surveyor and Inspector of Nuisances for the town of Northfleet
in Kent. He was also the founder and captain of the
town’s first Fire Brigade. Born in Plymouth in 1828, Samuel
was the tenth and last child, and the only surviving son, of William and
Dorothy Honeycombe. William, a
millwright and sawyer, had been born in 1786 at Liskeard in Cornwall,
Cornwall being
the ancestral heartland of all the Honeycombes in the world. Their spread across the world, and the global
movement of many other families, is typified by the fact that William was born
in Liskeard, Samuel in Plymouth, Henry in
Gravesend, Gordon in Edinburgh and I in India.
It was in the May and June of 1925 that
Gordon and Louie became more than friends and achieved some kind of
understanding about a relationship, even one involving marriage. They
would both become 27 that summer.
When he travelled south to work in Vacuum
Oil’s office in London for two weeks before
sailing to New York,
his sister, Donny, went with him. They
stayed in a small hotel in Westbourne Terrace.
On their first day there together, a Sunday, they walked into Hyde Park,
around Kensington
Gardens and along Bayswater Road and
then they went to the Zoo. On
subsequent evenings he showed her around the West End,
travelling by the Underground, which scared her. They saw Rose Marie at the Drury Lane Theatre. She auditioned for the D’Oyly Carte Company
but to her dismay wasn’t accepted. Now
she had to find a job – and tell her brother that she was not going home. ‘What!’ he shouted. They argued and both became very upset. He wrote to their mother, and Mary Elder sent
letters and telegrams to Donny telling her not to be so silly, and insisting
and then begging that she return home, to no avail.
In the meantime Donny obtained a job as a
book-keeper ‘with knowledge of typing an advantage’, and on their last Saturday
together Gordon took her to see No, No, Nanette at the Palace Theatre, starring
Binnie Hale. On the Monday they
separated, he on the first stage of his journey to New York and she to her first day of work at
a Wholesale Furriers in Hanover
Street. It
didn’t last long.
The
rest of her story is told in amazingly well-remembered detail in her Memories. His story will have to be told, imperfectly,
by me.
After completing the course in New York, Gordon returned to Bridge
of Allan in October 1925, and towards
the end of the month he travelled down to London
to see Donny before sailing back to India. She was now working, unhappily, as a
receptionist in a hotel in Westbourne Terrace, a short distance from where they
both had stayed. He took her out to
dinner at the Criterion Restaurant and over coffee and liqueurs suddenly said
that he was going to marry Louie Fraser and that their engagement had just been
officially announced. They would be
married in Karachi
in a year or two. In the meantime he
said he would have to work hard and save as much money as possible to provide
for their future home. He was back in Karachi by November 1925.
It was about this time, in the mid-1920s,
that my father used to visit the aerodrome at Drigh Road, northeast of Karachi, as Vacuum Oil’s sales
representative. He went there in
connection with the refuelling of the 4-engined, silvered passenger biplanes of
Imperial Airways, made by Handley Page, which had begun flying from London to Karachi
in 1924 and merged with BOAC in 1939. At
that time the flight to England
took three days and wasn’t that safe.
21 of their planes crashed and 75 people were killed. All of the planes had names that began with
an H. The Hengist, which first flew in
1931, was destroyed in a hangar fire at Drigh Road in May 1937.
Drigh
Road was also used by the RAF, and in January 1927
Aircraftsman TE Shaw (TE Lawrence) was posted there to assist in clerical
office duties concerning the RAF. In
his spare time he was writing an account of his activities with Arab tribes
fighting the Turks in the First World War and corresponding regularly with
Charlotte Shaw, the 70-year-old wife of George Bernard Shaw. In one of those quirky connections that
chance creates, when Lawrence tried to join the RAF in 1922 he had been
rejected by the recruiting officer in London, who happened to be Captain WE
Johns, the future author of the Biggles books, many of which I was to read
later on.
It seems that all the British in Karachi knew who TE Shaw
really was – the celebrated Lawrence of Arabia. I have a faint memory of being told that my
father, possibly even my mother, saw Lawrence
out at Drigh Road
while he was there and thought him rather odd.
For he turned down all invitations and never left the base. He was a little man, with a slight, boyish
figure and a big head.
Lawrence
described the RAF base at Drigh
Road in his letters to Charlotte Shaw. In January 1927 he wrote, ‘The Depot is
dreary, to a degree, and its background makes me shiver. It is a desert.’ In March 1927 he wrote, ‘The aerodrome, a
mile-square flat place, just faintly tinted green … (lies) between the main
railway and a dry, four-mile wide valley of sand ridges overgrown with
dust-coloured tamarisk. At the end of
the aerodrome is a stony bank, perhaps 20 feet high, on which I sit beside a
cactus, and look back at the camp; from here rather like a broken Roman
aqueduct, with its rows of dark arches on two storeys, and a flat roof of tiles
above. North of the railway is a mass
of building, married quarters, officers houses, mess and hospital. Unattractive, since it has no plan.’
Cattle roamed here and there, and camels
were tethered in the little shade there was.
Lawrence
left Drigh Road
in May 1928.
Meanwhile, back in August 1926 in London,
Donny had been given a two-week break from her duties in Westbourne Terrace and
returned to Bridge of Allan, where she helped her mother and Billy Elder move
into another ground-floor flat conversion in a house called Kelvingrove.
She also saw Louie at Fernfield. Louie said that it had not been possible for
her to journey to India
that year, as she had hoped, mainly for financial reasons. She expected to be on her way by next autumn
and would be married almost immediately after her arrival. She showed Donny some of the wedding gifts
she had already received and part of her trousseau. She told Donny how much she was looking
forward to her marriage and her new life in India. I imagine she now found her cloistered life
in Bridge of Allan, living with her parents, to be
somewhat inhibiting and oppressive.
It was not in fact until November 1927
that Louie sailed from Liverpool to India. As far as I know she had never been out of Scotland, not even to England, and now she was voyaging
to faraway foreign climes and shores, of which she knew little, apart from what
Gordon had told her and about which she may have read in magazines.
Curiously, before she was born, the Census
of 1891 tells us that a young woman, Mary Farquharson, had lodged with Dr
Fraser and his wife, Christina, in their first house, Dunallan. This Mary was 21, the same age as Christina
Fraser, and had been born in Lower Bengal in the east of India. If she was a friend of the family and of
Louie’s mother she, if still living in Bridge
of Allan, could have described what
she knew of India’s
climate, culture and customs. As it
was, there was probably some retired officer or businessman in the village, who
might have advised her, as could employees of Graham’s in Glasgow, about what
to wear and what not to eat or drink.
The four-week voyage from Liverpool to
Bombay would have been a daily thrill and wonder to Louie -- the ship’s passage
across the wide blue sea, the foreign ports, the shipboard dances, the gala and
tombola nights, the cocktail parties and the deck-games. She would have exulted in her freedom and
the admiration of the male passengers and the merry conversations with other
women sunning themselves in deckchairs on the upper decks. There was also a daily sweepstake, in which
passengers had to guess how far the ship had sailed in the prvious 24
hours. It’s probable she travelled with
and shared a cabin with Mrs Jean Carstairs, who would later be a witness at
Louie’s wedding, and who may have acted as a casual chaperone. Mr Carstairs was Secretary of the Golf Club
in Karachi. But Louie was now 29, old enough not to need
a chaperone, nor want one. She was also
a bit of a flirt, and would have taken a romantic interest in the ship’s
uniformed officers and any unattached, clean-cut, nice-looking and
well-mannered young man. She was much
attracted to a tall handsome Scot, Yule Rennie, another passenger, and told me
later on that she would have married him, were it not for the fact that he was
a minister and was going to marry her to Gordon in Karachi.
From Bombay
she would have travelled up to Karachi
in a cargo boat that carried goods as well as passengers and the mail. It arrived at Karachi about 10 pm and passengers’ luggage
wasn’t delivered to where they were staying until four or five hours later.
It seems that Louie stayed with Jean
Carstairs and her husband before the marriage. For I
have a torn envelope – the letter is missing -- addressed by Louie’s mother to
‘Miss DL Fraser, c/o Mrs Carstairs, Bleak House Road, Karachi.’ Here her trousseau would have been unpacked,
cleaned and pressed and the wedding presents she had brought with her removed
from her cabin trunk. She would have
begun to experience the social pleasures of Karachi, the sunshine, the servants, the
clubs (for the British only), the parties and days at the beach.
On Tuesday, 20 December 1927, the marriage
took place in St Andrew’s Church, Karachi,
of Louie Fraser and Gordon Honeycombe.
The pale brown church had a tall thin steeple and a long nave, a large
rose window with no stained glass, and like other late Victorian buildings
erected by the British was oversized and unadorned.
Gordon was living at the time of the
marriage at Variawa House, Bath
Island Road (the number isn’t given in the
marriage certificate) and is described in the certificate as a ‘Merchant’. He was now
in fact a sales manager, in charge of a department. Both
of them were aged 29. The witnesses were
Jean Carstairs and John Wylie Anderson.
The ceremony was performed by the handsome chaplain of St Andrew’s
Church, J Yule Rennie.
Louie wore a short white dress, its
zig-zag hem just covering her knees.
She had white silk stockings and simple Mary Jane shoes. A long loose veil attached to a head-hugging
bandana or cloche, fashionable then, hid her forehead and ears. In a photograph of the wedding reception it
looks as if her arms were covered by transparent gossamer sleeves. Gordon wore a high white collar and tails and
white spats. She seems, in a photo
taken at the church door, to be two inches taller than him. Unsmiling, she clutches a large bouquet. Gordon looks cheerful and smiles.
The reception was held out of doors in
someone’s garden. The guests would have
included his business colleagues and their wives, as well as some civic and
military friends. At one table sat a
group of Indian businessmen or customers of Vacuum Oil and at another their
wives all garbed in saris. At least ten
white-coated and turbaned Indian servants were in attendance, serving drinks,
snacks and pieces of wedding cake.
Where Gordon and Louie went on their honeymoon is not known.
Their first child, a daughter, was born
just over a year later, on 30 December 1928.
Christened Phyllis Irene, none of which were family names, the baby died
within four days.
A light-hearted letter written by Louie’s
mother before this, on Sunday, 12 August 1928, describes various social summer
events that she and Dr Fraser had attended, along with their eldest daughter, Ada. She can’t have been well as her doctor gave
her strict instructions not to go to a Garden Party at Stirling Castle. She
disobeyed him and went. ‘I am glad to
hear you have started taking porridge again,’ she told Louie. ‘It will be very good for you just now. I hope you are feeling well.’ She remarked that she had sent copies of two
local papers to Karachi
– ‘They will interest you both.’ The
letter ended ‘With much love to you both … Your affectionate Mother … CB
Fraser.’
This letter was kept by Louie, as it was
the last one she received from her mother, who died on Friday, 22 March 1929 at
the age of 59. As it happens, I also kept the last letter my
mother wrote to me.
In Bridge of Allan,
after a service in the parish church, where her father, the Rev John Reid, had
been the minister for 35 years, Christina Fraser was buried the following
Monday in Logie Churchyard. At the
service the current minister, the Rev Wilson, spoke of her as ‘a care-free
girl, faithful wife, devoted mother, sympathetic counsellor, and loyal
friend.’ He said, ‘She was loved and
respected by all who knew her, and most of all by those who knew her best … She
was a lover of all true, good and beautiful things – flowers, music and
friends. Hers was indeed a happy life.’
In 1930 Louie was pregnant again. She wanted the birth to be in Scotland, in
order that the birth and the baby could receive the best attention. So in July Gordon and Louie voyaged back to Britain. They
stayed at Fernfield with the ageing Dr Fraser, and his eldest daughter, Ada, now 39. Unmarried, Ada was looking after the family home as well
as her father. She was an expert cook,
having been a pupil at Atholl
Crescent, a well-known Domestic
Science School
in Edinburgh.
Also in July, in Bournemouth,
Dorothy Honeycombe married Harold Barry, a wealthy gentleman of independent
means (he didn’t work). He was 48 and
had been married before. She was 29 and
they had met at the Burlington Hotel in Bournemouth
where she’d been working as a hotel receptionist. The similarities between her marriage and
the first marriage of her mother are more than coincidental. Both met their future husbands in a
hotel. Both men were much older than
their brides, were comparatively well-off, had been married before and had
children.
However, Donny’s wedding ceremony was very
basic and business-like and not at all like her mother’s. It was in a register office and attended by
no family members and only two guests, both friends of Harold. There was no wedding reception or
lunch. The newly-weds set off on their
honeymoon in Harold’s smart new Chrysler car, doing a leisurely tour of Wales, the Lake District, and southern Scotland. In Glasgow,
Mary Elder and Billy came up from Kilmarnock
to meet the Barrys at the Grosvenor Hotel.
The Barrys then drove on to Bridge
of Allan and booked into
the Royal Hotel.
The following afternoon, early in August
1930, Donny and Harold had tea at Fernfield with Gordon, Louie and Dr
Fraser. It was an elaborate affair,
supervised by Ada,
assisted by a maid. A silver tea
service was laden with an assortment of pancakes, scones and cakes and several
pots of home-made jams, all made by Ada.
There was much to talk about, as Harold Barry had never met any of the
others and Donny hadn’t seen Gordon for five years. The Frasers would have marvelled that Donny
had married so well, her husband being a wealthy, albeit middle-aged,
Englishman. Inevitably the three men
ended up conversing together, as did the three women. Donny thought that Louie, heavily pregnant,
looked well and happy, and that Dr Fraser was ‘visibly failing.’ She was right – Dr Fraser died four months
later, on 14 December 1930; he was 73.
The next day Harold and Donny toured Stirling Castle
and visited Logie
Cemetery where her father
was buried – and where she herself would be buried in 2003. There was no gravestone and Harold said he
would have one erected in due course. And
he did. That evening Gordon dined with
the Barrys at the Royal Hotel. He
arrived on his own as Louie was sensitive about being seen in public with a
swollen belly and Ada and Dr Fraser thought that
Gordon and Donny would have much to discuss, as it was likely that they wouldn’t
meet again before he and Louie returned to India, hopefully with the baby.
The Barrys then continued on their grand
tour of Scotland, driving as
far as Inverness and on to John o’
Groats. On their return they moved into
a residential hotel, called Solent Pines, in Bournemouth
and collected Harold’s two small dogs, wire-haired terriers called Jo-Jo and
Tuppence. But before long they were off
again, to visit some friends of Harold in Rye.
It was in Winchelsea that Donny saw an
announcement in a morning paper that a baby daughter had been born in Edinburgh to Gordon and
Louie Honeycombe on 28 August 1930. She
was christened Dorothy Marion but was known only by her second name. This
must have been a compromise, as Louie wasn’t that fond of the first name,
Dorothy, and Gordon’s sister was not a special friend. Marion’s
name, which was originally meant to be Mary Ann, was based on the name of one
of Louie’s girl-friends, Marie. The names of her first baby, Phyllis Irene,
had probably also been those of friends or possibly of stage or film actresses.
Louie and Gordon, taking baby Marion with
them, sailed back to India
a few months later, probably in October.
And when Louie became pregnant again, in 1931, she was determined,
because of Marion’s successful birth, to return
to Scotland
for the third. This time she hoped to
have a son.
And so, in April 1932, Louie, Gordon and
Marion, who would be two in August, sailed again for Britain, arriving early in
May. They stayed in Edinburgh, in a rented flat at 9 Grosvenor Street
off Shandwick Place,
as Dr Fraser had died in December 1930 and the family home at Fernfield had
been sold.
A baby boy was born there, prematurely, at
4.40 pm on 29 May 1932. Christened
Henry Gordon, he died some two weeks later, at 7.45 pm on 16 June. Louie registered his birth the following day
and was the informant on both occasions.
She gave her address on the death certificate as 3 Bath Island Road, Karachi. Her third child apparently died because of
his premature birth and also of marasmus, a wasting disease. He was buried in Morningside
Cemetery in Edinburgh.
A week or so later, while Gordon was away
in London on a visit to his company’s offices – it was now called Standard
Vacuum, abbreviated to Standard Vac, two American oil companies having merged
in 1931 – Louie took Marion down to Kilmarnock to show her off to her
grandmother, Mary Elder, and her Aunt Donny.
Donny was now visiting Scotland
once a year, without Harold, to see her mother and her friends in Bridge of Allan.
Louie, wrote Donny, was ‘still strikingly attractive and smartly
dressed, but was thinner and depressed since losing her baby son.’ She described Marion as being not a very pretty child but
remarkably self-possessed and talkative, though she was not yet two.
A
month or so later, Louie, Gordon and Marion were
back in Karachi,
at their first-floor flat in 3
Bath Island Road.
But Louie was not one to be a stay-at-home
wife and mother. She liked having a
good time, as well as the special glamour of a four-week voyage on an
ocean-liner, and in 1934, she and Gordon returned yet again to Scotland. She undoubtedly also missed seeing her
brothers and sisters and her friends.
All these trips, by boat, train and car,
were quite costly, as was Louie’s liking for the latest fashions and the
life-style of living in hotels, where regular meals and service, if not
servants, were provided. Not that Gordon
seemed to mind. He also enjoyed the
social life and activities that were to be had on board an ocean liner, not to
mention the extended holiday that took him away from the heat and demands of
office work in Karachi. Scotland
was also home to him – he had been born there and his mother was still living
there – and the green, hilly golf-courses of Edinburgh were much superior to the flat
desert sands and ‘browns’ of the Karachi Golf Club, the ‘greens’ being made of
sand mixed with oil and flattened with a heavy roller.
There is no mention of this visit in my
Aunt’s Memories, perhaps because she and Harold did an exceptional amount of
travelling in 1934, spending several months in Switzerland
and Paris, before entertaining the players who
took part in the British Hard Court Championships at the West Hants Tennis Club
in Bournemouth. Their
guests were an Australian couple, Harry Hopman and his wife – the Hopman Cup, a
tennis competition named after him, would later be played annually in Perth, Western
Australia, where I live now.
Donny and Harold then drove all over Ireland,
and in July moved into a top-floor flat in Toft House on Manor Road. In August, travelling by train, they visited
Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Nuremburg and Cologne and saw a performance of the
Passion Play at Oberammergau. Not
knowing of this, I would write my own passion play, based on the English cycles
of mystery plays when I was at Oxford. Throughout this holiday Donny and Harold
were discomfited by the ubiquitous Nazi uniforms and German flags and people
saying ‘Heil Hitler!’ It was not until
October that Donny journeyed north to see her mother and Billy in Kilmarnock. By
then the Honeycombe family was back in India.
Confirmation of their summer in Scotland is in
a filmed record made by Gordon and called On Leave.
He had bought a ciné-camera, and the first
silent scenes he filmed – Louie also filmed a few -- were of the family playing
about on Bruntsfield Links beside the Meadows.
Trams pass along a road in the background and it’s possible they were
staying in the nearby Leamington Hotel or another in Leamington Terrace. Other scenes show Louie and Marion walking
past the Scottish War Memorial in Princes
Street Gardens,
various scenes in Princes Street
itself, and a day they spent on the beach at North Berwick. Marion,
not yet four, is generally unsmiling and even grumpy, obviously disinclined to
co-operate, to smile and perform for the camera.
The next scenes are of the visit of King
George V and Queen Mary to Edinburgh
in the first week of July 1934. Gordon
manages to get quite near the royal car and carriage, but these move so quickly
that the occupants pass by in a blur. A
decorated floral tram-car rattling along Princes Street is an eye-catching
sight. Louie, looking very smart, is
seen out shopping with Marion
in Princes Street,
which is full of people and traffic -- cars, trams, a horse and cart. As there weren’t any pedestrian crossings
then, people mill about, haphazardly crossing the road and casually walking
along it. Gordon and Louie are filmed
playing golf at Mortonhall, on the south side of the Braid Hills, he in plus
fours and she in slacks, and then there’s a trip to the Zoo, to view Highland cattle, lions, penguins, a polar bear and some
seals. Marion is shown playing with her
four-year-old, fair-haired cousin, Gordon Fraser, in the Meadows. He was the only son of Louie’s older brother,
Alastair. His wife, Jenny Fraser,
appears in this episode with Louie and laughingly, to oblige the cameraman,
they push each other over.
In September, Louie, Gordon and Marion
sailed back to India
and to their other life in the British Raj.
1935 passed by and the world moved nearer to total war and the British
towards the dissolution of British India.
Louie and Gordon had planned no other children. But after the rowdy New Year celebrations at
the balloon-decked, brightly lit Gymkhana, where a fancy-dress dance party
culminated at midnight with all the revellers forming a large circle, holding
each other’s crossed hands and singing Auld Lang Syne, my parents floated home
about 5.0 am or so, to the crowing of distant cocks, and it was probably then
that my father grazed his knees on the Indian carpet on the bedroom floor of
their flat.
Early in 1936, Louie, who was 37, found
she was pregnant again.
One of the many British, American and
European married couples attending that jolly New Year’s Eve fancy dress party
at the Gymkhana were Marjorie and Orlo Bond -- he was one of my father’s older
and senior colleagues in Standard Vac.
They had married in 1928, produced three little girls and lived in a
two-storey rented house with a large garden at 7 Mary Road, across the road from our
flat in Variawa House. Mrs Bond wrote
home regularly to her parents in the USA
and her letters provide a lively and interesting account of the social and
domestic details of life in Karachi
in 1936. In addition to all the bridge parties,
cocktail parties, fancy dress parties, receptions, dinners, dances, weekend days
at the beach, at the Boat Club and the Country Club, she wrote about the
children’s illnesses, about her difficulties with servants and nannies, and listed
the films she and her husband saw – Mutiny on the Bounty, with Clark Gable,
Curly Top, with Shirley Temple, Rose Marie, with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette
MacDonald, Showboat, with Paul Robeson.
She also noted the various national and international events in 1936
that impinged on their lives.
In January she mentions that my parents
visited the Bonds’ home in Mary Road accompanied by a young Australian pilot
called Grapler – ‘a shy and uninteresting sort of fellow,’ according to Mrs
Bond -- who was flying from England to Australia, no doubt in pursuit of some
record flight in a fragile biplane, as others were doing at that time – like Amy
Johnson, a pioneering English aviator who set up numerous long-distance records
in the 1930s. A major event that
affected everyone early in 1936 was the death at Sandringham
on 20 January of King George V, aged 70.
He was succeeded by his oldest son, Edward the Prince of Wales, known by
his family as David. A lengthy period
of official mourning caused the cancellation of all social gatherings in Karachi, like parties,
dances and race meetings. Cinemas also
closed, as well as some major stores.
But a fancy dress party for children at the Gymkhana on 31 January went
ahead, at which, Mrs Bond complained, ‘two ugly clowns’ frightened the younger children.
After a visit by the Aga Khan in February,
the new Governor of Sind (until then part of the Bombay
presidency) arrived in Karachi
on 1 April. At 8.25 am Sir Lancelot and
Lady Graham stepped ashore from HMIS Indus at the docks at Keamari and,
accompanied by a scarlet-coated entourage wearing plumed helmets and greeted by
a 17-gun salute, they proceeded along a red carpet to one of the large
warehouse sheds, where speeches and presentations were made and a band played
appropriately rousing British tunes. As
the British community was still in official mourning for the death of George V,
people were required to wear black or white or a mix of both. I expect my parents were there and may even
have been, being British, among those who were presented. The Bonds, being American, may not have
been.
Mrs
Bond notes in her letters that the luxury liner, the Queen Mary, made her
maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on
27 May and that the huge German dirigible, the Hindenburg, was crossing the Atlantic three times a month. A year later the Hindenburg caught fire as
she was docking at a mooring mast in Lakehurst,
New Jersey and crashed
spectacularly in flames. 13 passengers,
22 of the crew and one of the ground crew were killed. Amazingly 62 people survived.
In June 1936 the new Governor took the
salute at the march-past and fly-past celebrating the new king’s Birthday
Parade, greeted this time by a 31-gun salute, and in August the Bonds were
glued to their new radio, marvelling at the American commentaries broadcast
live during the Berlin Olympic Games.
On 28 August Marion was six and her birthday party was attended by about
a dozen little girls and boys, including the three Bond girls and, if Mrs
Bond’s menu for children’s parties can be taken as a guide, they feasted on
five different types of sandwiches – salmon, sardine, egg, tomato and asparagus
– gingersnaps, chocolate and digestive biscuits, sausage rolls, curry puffs,
cupcakes, raisin cake and of course ice cream.
There would also have been games and prizes and probably a magician or
conjuror to entertain them.
I was there as well of course, as Louie
was now eight months pregnant. She must
have felt quite exhausted by all the restless energy of the children, by the
shrieks, squeals, arguments and possibly tears, and by the heat of an Indian
summer.
A month later I was born, on 27 September.
3. KARACHI,
1936-1946
Karachi,
capital of the province of Sind, was then part of British India and since 1947
has become the largest city in what is now Pakistan. This change would cause nationality problems
later on, as to whether I was British or Pakistani. I was also born in the brief reign of Edward
VIII, who abdicated on 10 December that year as a result of his scandalous
affair with a divorced American, Mrs Simpson, and was immediately succeeded by
his younger brother, King George VI – all of which would have been extensively
covered, photographically, in the new American magazine, Life,
I was christened Ronald Gordon Honeycombe
and called Ronald up to the age of 19.
I was Ronnie in India
and Ron at school in Edinburgh but always Ronald to my mother. Margaret Hankinson, who lived in Mary Road, which
was parallel to Bath Island Road,
wrote to me years later and said, ‘I remember when you were very new &
cried a lot at night, your father slept on.
Your mother said she walked about saying, “Oh God help me.” She did not bear grudges. She was tall, thin, dark & very amusing,
full of fun, often very naughty.’
She probably found time to be among the
525 guests who attended the Government House Garden Party on 24 November and
were presented to the Governor while the band played and tea was served in
marquees. And then in December there
was a Reception for 300 guests on board a new liner, the City of Benares, and a cocktail
party on a visiting British cruiser, HMS Norfolk, followed by the Sind Club
Ball, where the lawns were covered with Indian carpets to help the ladies
smoothly walk about while a dance band played.
A champagne supper was served in a palatial tent decorated with
poinsettias and large bunches of chrysanthemums. In 3 Bath Island Road Christmas decorations
and a tree would have adorned the living-room, now heated by oil stoves or electric
fires, and Indian agents and businessmen who dealt with Standard Vac would have
delivered lavish gifts of fruit and nuts, dried fruit and cakes, and bottles of
wine and whisky. The children of the
servants who lived in the old stables at the rear of Number 3 were presented in
turn with Christmas-wrapped gifts of toys, sweets, cakes and fruit.
As a
baby I wasn’t in Bath Island Road
for very long. Although I had a short,
dumpy and very dark-skinned ayah, the Indian equivalent of a nanny, who performed
the necessary services involved in bringing up baby, she didn’t breast-feed
me. I assume this because within five
months of my birth, early in March 1937, my mother, who was now 38, and Marion,
now 6, and my very small self, were on a liner bound once again for England, but this time for the port of Plymouth
in Devon.
Why Plymouth,
rather than Southampton or Liverpool? There can’t have been many liners from India that anchored at Plymouth.
But the idea was that my mother and her charges would entrain from Plymouth to Bournemouth
and acquire some suitable accommodation there for a few weeks while they became
acclimatised to British weather conditions.
They would then proceed north to chilly Scotland. This was Gordon’s explanation in a letter he
wrote in April to his sister, Donny. He
said he would follow his family to Britain
in May or June and be at home on leave in Scotland during the summer. I imagine my mother also wished to display
me to her family and friends in Scotland
and protect me from the summer heat of India. There was also another reason for this
return – Marion
was going to be put in a boarding-school.
Donny looked at the calendar and saw that
the date of the ship’s arrival in Plymouth would
be on Easter Monday, 29 March, one of the busiest weekends in England on the
trains and on the roads. Harold Barry
decided that he and Donny would have to drive to Plymouth, pick the family up and let our
luggage follow on by train. In the
meantime, Donny booked us into a small inexpensive residential hotel, Elstead,
in tree-lined Knyveton Road,
which was three streets away from Toft House, 43 Manor Road, where the Barrys were
living in a top-floor self-contained flat set back from the cliff and
overlooking the sea.
My Aunt would spend the last years of her
life, from 1988, in a rest home for elderly ladies in Knyveton Road; it was called Knyveton
Hall. I often visited her there. Long before this, in the summer of 1959, I
happened to teach a group of Scandinavian students English in a house right next
door to the Victorian house that later on became Knyveton Hall, and where Aunt
Donny would die, in March 2003, aged 102.
Having stayed in a hotel on Plymouth Hoe
overnight, Donny and Harold were waiting at a landing-stage when a tender
brought Louie, me and Marion ashore from the liner anchored out in the
bay. How strange that circumstances had
combined to ensure that I landed, the last of my line, in the Honeycombes’
ancestral sea-port of Plymouth,
which was on the Devon bank of the River Tamar where it met the sea. And ten miles or so up-river in Cornwall was the ancestral
village of Calstock and Honeycombe House.
Donny wrote that Louie ‘was carrying the
baby in her arms, Marion
was clutching her mother’s coat, and a porter was alongside holding a suitcase
and a carry-cot … I wanted to look at the baby.
He was so warmly wrapped up in shawls, all I could see uncovered was a
small face. He was awake and as I looked at him he gave a
little gurgle and smiled.’
They drove away from Plymouth, pausing for lunch at a hotel in
Honiton. My Aunt wrote, ‘While Louie
was in the cloak-room attending to the baby’s requirements I was able to talk
to Marion. She was now six and a half years’ old, a
bright, intelligent girl without a trace of shyness.’ When Louie returned, ‘the carry-cot with
Ronald inside was placed on two chairs alongside the table, where we could all
see him, and then we settled down to our meal and to hear more details of the
voyage.’
What does a baby make of what it sees and
hears? A melange of voices, sounds and
movements that are seen and heard as wondrously curious and interesting
novelties. Everything is accepted and
absorbed without judgement, and incidents, places and people are noted and stored
away until things very slowly begin to make some sort of sense. I was a placid, happy baby and smiled a
lot. Now in my second childhood I’m
placid and happy, most of the time, and smile a lot. But I’ve learned, at last, a lot and have
begun, at last, to know myself.
In Bournemouth Louie unpacked and settled
into the Elstead Hotel in Knyveton
Road, which was at the other end of the road from
the future Knyveton Hall. We had a room
on the ground floor, which had two beds and a cot, a wash-basin with H and C,
and there was a bathroom next door.
Donny contrived to spend as much time as she could with Marion and
me. Me she wheeled out in my pram to Boscombe Gardens, where spring flowers were in
full bloom and the tennis courts in use.
‘I was a very good baby,’ she said.
She saw Louie frequently and began to form
some opinions that were not that favourable to her sister-in-law. Donny wrote that Louie was a complex
character and unpredictable. It
astonished her that Louie should need a nanny – a young girl had been hired
straightaway. But Louie of course was
used to ayahs minding the children and tending to their washing and other
needs. Donny also noted that Louie was
extravagant in other ways. ‘She would
walk idly around a shop looking at articles she didn’t require, but which she
liked and thought might come in useful one day. She
would buy these things, and on one occasion I remember being quite shocked when
she insisted on buying some expensive cups and saucers. She admitted she didn’t need them, but
thought they were so pretty she couldn’t resist them. She never returned from a shopping
expedition without two or three glossy magazines and sweets for Marion and the nanny.’
Louie took Marion and me for tea at the
Toft several times and on several occasions Harold took everyone for a car
drive in the New Forest or along the
coast. They always stopped somewhere to enjoy a Dorset cream tea.
Harold, wrote Donny, got along quite well with Louie. ‘She flattered him and paid him pretty
compliments, which amused him.’ One day
she suddenly announced that she would be leaving the following week. Her older sister, Ada,
had booked Louie and the children into a small hotel in Leamington Terrace, in
the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. Harold made all the travel arrangements and
a few days later he and Donny saw us off at Bournemouth’s Central Station for
the long train journey, via London, to Edinburgh, where we
shared a room in a small hotel in Leamington Terrace.
Marion
remembered later that she and I were taken by our mother to play on nearby
Bruntsfield Links. She also remembered
that when taken into a dark or darkened room in the hotel, my eyes opened very
wide – which amused my mother, and Marion.
Another source of amusement was my thin brown hair, which was resolutely
straight. To remedy this, my mother
tried to curl it, and succeeded in turning it into a shape like a palm-tree on
the top of my head. In those days,
babies, whether boy or girl, were dressed in smocks, and there is a studio
photo of me sitting happily on a carpeted table with waved strands of hair
above my ears and a seedling palm-tree over all. Marion
described me as a ‘very bonny’ baby.
In June or July my father joined the
family in Edinburgh and we all moved into the
three-storey Donisla Hotel in the Mayfields
Gardens section of Craigmillar Park Road. A young Scottish nanny called Elma was
employed to look after me and Marion and visited us daily during the week. There was another reason for this move to
the Donisla – St Margaret’s School, where Marion
was about to become a boarder, wasn’t far away.
While in Edinburgh my father once again acquired or
hired a ciné-camera and filmed several scenes involving the whole family. In one scene, I am watching Marion play patience, peering at the cards
from the edge of the table. In another
I am on my feet and walking somewhat unsteadily, with my feet wide apart, and
carrying a large picture book. Then I
am sitting in an easy chair with the picture-book while Marion hides behind the
chair, makes animal noises and causes me to look around to see who or what is
doing so. Scenes indoors are lit by
sunshine pouring in from a window.
Outdoor scenes are of me and Elma, me and my mother in the Botanical
Gardens, and of me in a small pram.
There are no golfing scenes this time or of the decorations that must
have been everywhere in Princes
Street for the coronation of King George VI on 12
May 1937. Gordon probably didn’t reach Edinburgh until a month
or more after that.
In July or August he travelled down to Bournemouth for a week to see his sister. He
stayed at the Toft and was taken for drives in the New Forest and around Dorset villages with their thatched cottages and
flower-filled gardens. The greenness of
it all delighted him, as did drinks at the Tennis Club and a round or two of
golf.
One day he told Donny that he and Louie
were planning to put Marion into a
boarding-school and leave her there when they returned to Karachi.
This was the general practice then of parents living in India or
stationed abroad – even young children became boarders, only seeing their
parents every two or three years, usually during the summer months. But Donny was astonished – Marion
was seven that August – and she wondered how her parents could bear to leave Marion behind. But Louie believed that her children, and
not just her son, should receive the best education, and the best to her was a
Scottish one. Neither she nor her
sisters had been given a full education, which had benefited some of her
brothers. She would also have been
averse to her children growing up in India and being exposed to the all
that sun and the heat and to the possibility of contracting any tropical or
other diseases. Marion
would be better off in Scotland
from every point of view.
Towards the end of that summer Louie,
Marion and I spent a week or so holidaying at Crail on the coast of Fife – Elma went with us. This probably occurred when Gordon was down
in Bournemouth and was my first experience of sandy beaches, sandcastles and
the cold North Sea. Or this may have occurred when Gordon found
the time, as he would have done, to visit his mother in Kilmarnock.
In September 1937, when the next school
year began, an excited and eager Marion was taken to St Margaret’s School in
East Suffolk Road, a five-minute walk away from the Donisla Hotel, and was left
in the hands of the matron at the school, Miss Peat, who came from Bridge of
Allan, as did her sisters and a brother.
In the holidays Marion would be taken
into one or other of their homes, and in Edinburgh,
during term-time, she was regularly taken out on Saturdays by Aunt Ada, who was
now employed as a companion to a woman living in Corstorphine. Ada bought Marion sweets and
comics. At St Margaret’s the sweets had
to go into a communal tin, to be shared by the girls in Marion’s class after the evening meal.
Gordon and Louie continued to live nearby,
at the Donisla. Gordon had told Donny
that he and Louie wanted to see Marion happily
settled in her new school before they returned to India with baby Ronald in
October. But when Donny travelled to
Edinburgh for three days at the beginning of October, after seeing her mother
and Billy in Kilmarnock, she was disappointed when, hoping to see her niece,
she was advised that ‘too many visits’ might upset Marion, and that her parents
were only going to visit the school when they went to say goodbye. ‘Baby Ronald had grown noticeably,’ Donny
noted.
In fact, a few days later, Marion was taken by Miss
Peat to Waverley Station and waved a cheerful goodbye to her parents and baby
Ronald, now aged one.
By
November 1937 Louie, my father and I were back in Karachi and now safely installed in Variawa
House, 4 Bath Island Road.
It had been a four month holiday for my
father, including the time spent at sea, and I wonder how it was possible for
him to take so much time off work, and that he could afford to do so. My mother had been in Scotland even
longer, staying in hotels with a baby and a nanny.
Before leaving Scotland,
Gordon had asked Donny if Marion
could stay with her during the summer holidays. Harold, when the matter had been cautiously
mentioned by Donny, agreed. And so, in
July 1938, Donny headed north and stayed with her mother, before collecting Marion from St Margaret’s and bringing her across to Kilmarnock for a few days. A long train journey, which meant changing
trains several times, eventually brought them both to Bournemouth,
and for a month all went well. Dorothy wrote that Marion was ‘a dear little girl and a
delightful companion: intelligent, alert and easy to please.’
Then two days before Marion’s eighth birthday, on 28 August 1938,
a telegram arrived from the school asking that she should be returned to St
Margaret’s as soon as possible. This
was because the headmistress thought that the situation in Europe and Germany was such – Hitler had invaded Austria and other countries were threatened --
that war was imminent and that England
was in danger of invasion. She told
Harold, who had telephoned her, that she was responsible for Marion’s
safety while her parents were in India.
So on 29 August Donny escorted Marion
back to Edinburgh before going to see her mother, while the Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich to meet Adolf Hitler for the third
time. The Munich Agreement was signed
and on his return Chamberlain waved the piece of paper containing the Agreement
at the cheering airport crowd. Later,
he addressed the crowd in Downing Street. He said, ‘I believe it is peace for our
time.’
In March 1939 Germany
invaded Czechoslovakia and Britain
prepared for war. Defences and air-raid
shelters were built in English towns and cities, gas-masks were issued,
conscription was introduced and the evacuation of children from London was planned. But it was not until 1 September 1939 that
the Germans invaded Poland. Two days later, on 3 September, Great Britain and France
declared war on Germany.
In her Memories Aunt Donny wrote, ‘It was
a Sunday at eleven o’clock in the morning, when we heard the dread news over
the radio. Harold and I looked at each
other, and without speaking walked out onto our balcony. The sun was shining brilliantly, the sea was
calm and not a cloud in the sky. We
could see from the Needles off the Isle of Wight
to the Old Harry Rocks at Swanage. It
was a picture of beauty and peace.
After a moment Harold turned to me and said, “Take a good look,
Donny. From today our whole world is
going to change. Nothing will ever be
the same again.”
St Margaret’s School was evacuated first
of all to Aberfeldy in Perthshire, where Marion
spent the winter, then to Strathtay, where she shared a bed with a girl who wet
the bed most nights, and finally, in January 1940, to Dunkeld, where she
started having piano lessons and in August picked raspberries.
Mrs Bond had visited the USA with her
three children in 1937. Orlo Bond remained
behind and hosted Amelia Earhart in June 1937 when she flew through Karachi on
what turned out to be her last flight -- her twin-engined plane and her
navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared somewhere in the Pacific Ocean in July.
Mrs Bond, who returned to Karachi in 1938 with
her youngest daughters, leaving Barbara behind to begin her education, commented
in a letter dated 8 January 1940, that everyone hoped for an Allied victory in
the Spring. She also noted later that
month that they had heard a new band on the radio – the Glen Miller Band. In March they were excited about an English
actress called Vivien Leigh, who was born in India,
and appearing in a movie called Gone With The Wind, which had just opened in Bombay. On 10 May she wrote that this was a day they
would not soon forget – ‘The radio news from Holland
and Belgium
is very sad and disheartening. The real
war has started now. Hope that Hitler will
stop this awful aggression.’ On 26 May
– ‘War situation looks very grave (France had fallen).’ On 16 June – ‘We are all feeling very sad
about France and the taking
over of Paris. So many children are coming out from England.’ On 13 October 1940 – ‘We heard Presiden
Roosevelt’s broadcast … We do not listen to the awful lies over the German
wireless, but we are encouraged by the very wise thinking America is doing and
the splendid courage of the British people.’
In
October the Bonds had their very own hut at Hawkes Bay,
called the Caravan (It had wheels).
They left Karachi in 1941, not returning to
India
until after the war.
The evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk began at the end of May 1940; the Germans entered Paris in June; and in July the Battle of Britain began in
the skies over southern England.
By this time Marion
was on her way to India. Gordon and Louie had decided that in view of
the threatened invasion of England,
Marion would be safer in India, and it had been arranged that she leave
on a ship from Liverpool, the Orion, in the company of the Mackenzies, a family
whose father worked with Gordon in Karachi. Donny was appalled – ‘The thought of that
little girl travelling thousands of miles through enemy submarine-infested
waters and dive-bombing attacks from the air filled me with horror and
apprehension. Our losses at sea,
particularly in the Merchant Navy, were frighteningly heavy; our warships
suffered too.’
Despite much wartime secrecy and confusion
Donny and Harold saw Marion
on her way. She was wearing her school
uniform when they met her in Liverpool. She had been brought there by a
schoolteacher. On the following day,
after a night spent in a hotel, they took her by train down to London and managed to meet up with Mrs
Mackenzie and her two daughters, Marjorie and Barbara. ‘Marion
joined their little group,’ wrote Donny.
‘She appeared to be quite unconcerned at what was happening. To her it was just another journey, and she
would soon be with her parents again in India … It was a very long
train. Marion had a window-seat and waved gaily to
us as the boat-train moved off … I could scarcely control my emotions.’
Donny was right to be anxious. The liner, RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Orion,
which had made her maiden voyage from Tilbury to Australia in September 1935
and had been converted into a troopship four years later, sailed from Liverpool
up to Clydebank, west of Glasgow, to join a convoy. She developed engine trouble and the convoy
sailed without her. Repairs took almost
a week. The Orion, with over 2,000
troops and civilians on board, then set off again, on her own, without any
naval protection. She docked for a day
at the British naval base at Freetown in Sierra Leone before heading south to Cape Town. There the Orion caught up with the convoy
and the passengers were allowed ashore.
Marion, who was sharing a cabin with the Mackenzies, was entranced by Cape Town’s scenic
beauty, by the mountains, flowers, tree-lined streets and the heat. Her school uniform had long since been
stowed away and now she wore cotton dresses and sandals.
A feature of the voyage, which lasted two
months, was the frequency of the life-boat drills, some being held when it was
wet and stormy – people were sick. The
drills were precautionary and necessary, for German U-boats lurked in both the
Atlantic and Indian
Oceans. But although there were scares, the ship
safely reached Bombay.
Not so fortunate was the City of Benares, which Mrs Bond had admired in Karachi in 1936. The brand-new liner had left Bombay on her maiden
voyage on 7 December that year. In
September 1940 she was in convoy with other ships, having left Liverpool for Canada with
about 90 children, evacuees, and other passengers on board. She was torpedoed, twice, by a German
U-boat and sank within half an hour. 77
of the children died; there were 105 survivors.
From Bombay
Marion and the Mackenzies travelled by train up to Karachi, where she was reunited with her
parents and me in 4 Bath Island
Road. Marion was now 10 years
old and on 27 September 1940 I was four.
My parents and I had been in Karachi since November
1938. Cared for by an ayah and my
mother and frequently fed and cleaned, I was oblivious to everything apart from
my surroundings and any persons who surrounded me. No memories of my beginnings and the start
of the war have of course remained, although vague, misty images and sensations
begin to surface about the time I was two and three.
My first memory is of a blinding sun and
being in a pram, a high pram, and being very and uncomfortably hot. I think this was because my ayah had taken
me out for an airing and had left me too long in the sun. Perhaps she had an assignation. More likely, she was gossiping with some
other ayahs. They used to gather under
trees at the end of our road or further away at a piece of hillocky ground that
was the original Bath
Island.
But perhaps, before I deal with other
early memories, I should say something to add to what Mrs Bond wrote about in
her letters, and fill in the background to my first nine years and the last
years of the British Raj.
Karachi in 1936, when I was born, was the
main sea-port of the Punjab and Sind, and after Bombay
it was the largest port and city on India’s western coast. Its population was made up of Hindus and
Muslims and many other ethnic groups, like Sikhs and Parsees, plus a mix of
Europeans, some Americans, and a collection of British military personnel. Known as the City of Lights,
and now in Pakistan, Karachi these days has an
even more heterogeneous and cosmopolitan population of 18 million and is one of
the largest cities in the world. Coincidentally, Perth
in Western Australia, where I live now, has
been dubbed the City of Light,
so-called by American astronauts passing overhead and noting how the city’s
isolation made its lights stand out in the general darkness of the west.
From the site of what would become Karachi, Alexander the Great, after his partial conquest
of northern India, sent his
purpose-built fleet back to Persia
while he took his depleted and exhausted forces overland, via the desert
country bordered by the Arabian Sea. The fleet had been assembled within a
natural harbour between the mainland and Manora, a rocky island connected to
the mainland by a long sand-bar, some seven miles long, which sheltered the
seaward approaches to Karachi. Further south were the many mouths and
mangrove swamps of the River Indus.
The climate of Karachi was and is relatively mild and
sub-tropical, with not much rain, except in the July/August monsoon season,
when torrential rain sometimes turned roads into rivers.
Margaret Hankinson told me in a letter,
‘Karachi was very flat, with wide open spaces, the airport seven miles inland …
Sandstorms were the curse, liable to blow up at any time without warning,
specially trying when you were giving a dinner party … Rain amounted to ¼ inch
a year with occasional exceptions. The
sunsets during the supposed “rainy” season were famous, once seen never
forgotten. Dinner was literally
impossible before 9 pm & then everyone wore evening clothes … Frocks were
always floor-length for evening, but variable during the day. The men wore white drill trousers both for
office and with the dinner jacket. Tailored shirts in the office. Shorts
& sports shirts for golf. Women
were just beginning to wear slacks in winter but few were seen.’
My mother was one of those women. She wore slacks when riding a bicycle, and
when playing golf she daringly began to wear sleeveless tops and shorts. Margaret
Hankinson continued, ‘During the war when petrol was rationed, your mother was
among the very few women to buy & ride a bike. I can see her now, gay as ever & going
strong.’
Sea-breezes alleviated the summer’s humid
heat, which averaged 34º but could climb to 44º. From the beginning of October the weather
changed and it became very dry. Loud
cracking sounds from wooden furniture would startle people, especially at
night. During the brief winter months the nights got
quite cold, and the British wives wore fur-coats when going out to a club or to
a party. Warmer winter wear was discarded towards the
end of March. One night there was an
under-sea earthquake and a tidal wave flooded the harbour area. Helen Johnson said that the punkah in her
bedroom shook like a leaf in a strong gale.
Marion
remembered that her bed shook for some seconds and that, shrieking, she fled to
her parents’ bedroom. Apparently I
slept on.
Before the Second World War, while the
British still governed India,
it was a wonderful place to live, especially for the wives and children. The men went to work mainly in and near McLeod Road, where
there were several major business and banking institutions and the main railway
station. The offices of Standard Vacuum
were on the first floor of Finlay House in McLeod Road. The building was the HQ of James Finlay
& Co, a Scottish import and export company dealing in tea, textiles and
cotton. They were also agents for Lloyds
of London and acted as shipping agents for the Clan and Ellerman lines. Frank
Maish, our next door neighbour in Bath
Island Road, was a director with Spencer & Co,
the main importer of wines, spirits, beer and soft drinks in Western
India.
Colin Campbell, who as a young man was
posted to Karachi
in 1937 and worked at Finlay’s, wrote to me in the Seventies. He said, ‘It was a pretty good place to be …
In those days Karachi was a real upcountry town
compared to Bombay.’ It was also, he said, ‘the cleanest town in India’ and had
a population of 200,000. Colin was paid
700 rupees a month at Finlay’s and managed to maintain two ‘very slow’
race-horses, which he exercised at the racecourse at 7.0 am, as well as having
a half-share in a sailing-dinghy and a half share in a hut at Sandspit. He was in the Indian Army during the war,
with the 19th KGVO Lancers, and served in Burma. He married in St Andrew’s Church in March
1946 – one of the bridesmaids was 17-year-old Alison Walker, my sister’s best
friend – and returned with his wife to Bombay. I remember him, faintly, in association with
Alison and my sister.
Victoria
Road and Elphinstone
Street were the centres of other businesses, where
families shopped, sometimes making inroads into one of the bazaars, like the
Bohri Bazaar. Bliss the chemist was, to
me, a haven of soapy smells and weighing-machines. The streets were always busy, thronging with
people, cars, camel-carts, donkey-carts, bullock-carts and horse-drawn
conveyances called gharrys. Animals
were everywhere, as cows and pi-dogs (scraggy, yellowy or rust-coloured native
dogs like dingos) freely roamed the streets, and crows and kites and sparrows
added their voices to the medley of traffic, tooting horns and disputatious Indians.
Every British and American family had
servants, and consequently social activities, at home and elsewhere, were
extensive, concentrating in the town on several whites-only clubs, where
anything bought in the way of food or drink, or given as a tip, was paid for by
signing a chit. Few people bothered to
carry any money on them – they ran up bills.
It was easy to buy and spend, and the modest salaries earned by the men
were frittered away on living expenses and social pleasures. Little was saved. Very few, if any, of the flats or houses
were owned – they were rented. Money
was spent on making ends meet and maintaining a showy and costly colonial way
of life, especially at the clubs, the most exclusive being a large
European-looking edifice with extensive grounds called the Sind Club, a
gentlemen’s club where single men stayed, as well as military, married and
businessmen when passing through Karachi.
Women were allowed in if
accompanied by a man. Children weren’t welcome. Nor was the Aga Khan. Much more welcome were Lord Wavell, Viceroy
of India from 1943 to 47, and his replacement, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who were
both entertained at the Sind Club.
Other clubs included the Golf Club and the
Boat Club, the Tennis Club, the Country Club and the Yacht Club. Mrs Hankinson said, ‘Even in the early days
of the war the parties were terrific & the drinking beggars description …
Dinner parties went out to some extent & cocktails took their place. They would begin about 7 pm & finish, if
successful, about 2 am. The main social
event of the year was the Sind Club Ball.
The fancy dress party at the Gymkhana on New Year’s Eve was less formal
& often quite wild.’
It was at the Boat Club that I was taught
by an officer to swim, rather apprehensively, in the dark water-snake and
crab-infested waters of the creek below the clubhouse, which was accessed by
pontoons and diving platforms covered with coconut matting. The creek was tidal, with a 10-feet fall in
the water when the tide went out, and Marion and her girl-friends had to be
careful not to be swept away when the ebb was in full flow. In the airy club-rooms above I would avidly
consume, until rebuked, peanuts, chips and small brown sausages that you dipped
in tomato sauce. Glasses of cold
lemonade and cherryade were favourite drinks.
The Boat Club was a popular venue on Sunday mornings before lunch.
At the Sind Club the women had their own
lounge, where a special pleasure, according to Mrs Hutchison and Mrs Hankinson,
were oysters served with Black Velvet.
Both women agreed that when couples went out for dinner, it was rather
late, about nine o’clock. When seeing
a film at a cinema across the road from the Sind Club, people used to hasten to
the club at the interval for a drink.
Rounds of golf were played at the Golf
Club in the morning, or in the late afternoon after work. Wives with their children would sit in cane
chairs on the terrace, being waited on by white-coated Indians and enjoying
cool drinks or a pot of tea. My father
was a very good player and won several cups.
My mother, playing on the ladies’ nine-hole course, also won the
occasional cup. Chokras served as
caddies and were paid four annas a round.
The club most frequented by families was
the Gymkhana, a low mock-Tudor gabled building, where there were lawns,
lounges, billiard tables, bars, a reading-room, a library and a dining-room,
where tiffin, a light lunch, might be enjoyed.
There were swings for the children, trees to climb, and a cricket ground
and tennis courts nearby, where Marion
played tennis with her girl-friends or some young officers. The grounds of Government House were on the
other side of a perimeter wall. On
Saturdays, the smart and well-drilled Baluch pipe-band, in their tunics,
turbans, knee-length trousers and white leggings, paraded up and down on the
lawn before the terrace or played arranged in a circle. The man vigorously banging the big bass drum
and wearing a tiger-skin over his shoulders was the most admired by me. Some of the boys would lie on the grass in
the path of the marching pipers, forcing them to step over them or around them.
When I was about five, I used to go to the
Gymkhana regularly on a Tuesday, as well as at weekends. There is a photo of me and my ayah sitting
at the back of a pony and trap and facing the rear. My mother must have sent it to her sister
Madge, for on the back she has written, ‘Ronald & his Ayah getting a lift in
a friend’s trap to the Gym. He goes in
it every Tuesday.’ This ayah was called
Angeline. At the Gymkhana the ayahs sat
together on the grass under the shade of the trees, patiently waiting until
their charges had to be taken home.
On the Gymkhana’s broad terrace overlooking
the lawn, the wives sat in wicker chairs, their legs aslant and their knees
together, sipping their gins and tonics and gimlets, or brandy and ginger ales,
gossiping and keeping an eye on their children. The men stood at the bars, wearing white
shirts, ties and well-pressed trousers, smoking cigarettes and downing their
chilled beers and chota pegs (tots of whisky and soda) or playing billiards and
snooker in a wood-panelled room adorned with trophies, where turbaned male
servants brought drinks to them on silver trays. This room was much frequented by my father,
who was a very good billiards player. Here he taught Marion how to play snooker. I
remember sitting on a leather bench by the wall, my feet not touching the
floor, watching him play billiards with three other men and being engrossed by
their angular movements, by the colours of the balls on the green baize, and by
the sharp sounds the balls made when struck or when rocketing satisfyingly into
a pocket.
Silver ash-trays were everywhere in the
clubs and small glass bowls of unskinned peanuts sat on tables and bar-tops. Few of the women smoked. If they did, they would use a
cigarette-holder. My mother never
smoked. My father smoked a lot, at
work, at night and at the weekend, inhaling, without filters, at least 20
cigarettes a day.
Marion
learned to tap-dance at the Gymkhana, taught by an American called Monkey. When she was in her middle teens she and
some of the other girls occasionally tap-danced for the entertainment of the
adults at parties. For this she wore a
red blouse, a short pleated black skirt, and black shoes with red ribbons. She was said to look like Ginger Rogers,
with her long hair, bleached by the sun, arranged in a bang on her
forehead.
Every month there were parties,
dinner-parties and Sunday lunches at the various clubs and at people’s homes,
where the main activity, apart from listening to the radio and reading
magazines, as well as the local paper and papers sent out from Britain, was
playing bridge or Mah Jong. On the radio, the six o’clock news,
transmitted by the BBC’s World Service and heralded by Lillibulero, its
signature tune, was a ritualistic event, the more so during the war years. Listening to the clear and polished English
voices, all male, who read the news, was reassuring to the adults, and the
green fields of ‘Home’ didn’t seem so far away.
Other rituals were children’s birthday
parties and fancy-dress parties, usually involving a gulli-gulli man (a
conjuror) and a ride for the children on a camel cart. There are photos of me in a Turkish costume,
with a red fez, a black velvet bolero jacket, baggy white trousers and a red
sash.
At Christmas time decorations were brought
out of a big cardboard box and, having been made in India, were large, lavish and
colourful. There were no streamers as
such. Our paper decorations were
concertinaed and strung overhead in long swooping lines in the sitting-room and
dining-room. A wreath interwoven with
holly and ivy (transported from the northern hill-stations where they grew) was
hung on the front door, and there was even a tall Christmas tree, covered in
tinsel and shiny coloured balls. At its base there were the assorted shapes of
brightly wrapped presents adorned with bows.
And there was ice-cream and exotic Indian sweetmeats, glacé and sticky,
and bowls of fruit – which had to be washed in water stained dark pink by a
sprinkling of permanganate of potash crystals.
Vegetables were also washed like this, and all drinking water and milk
had to be boiled. Boiled water was kept
in lemonade bottles in the fridge.
We didn’t go to church. Not that I remember. Being of Scottish origin, we were
Presbyterians. But I don’t think my
parents ever returned to St Andrew’s Church where they were married. However, towards the end of the war, Marion used to sing in
the choir at St Andrew’s evening services, when Mr Trotter was the
minister. At home, over Christmas,
festive music, including carols, would have been played on our wind-up
gramophone. At the Sind Club, on
Christmas Eve, some of the wives, having practised as a choir, sang carols
arrayed in silk and satin evening dresses on one of the staircases.
Carol-singers from some church or
charitable society may have sung to us outside Variawa House. If they did, they would have been invited up
for a drink and given some money. Being
a mostly Scottish family, my father and mother would have celebrated New Year’s
Eve with other Scottish and English grown-ups at the Gymkhana or Sind Club --
as they did before I was born -- forming a circle and singing ‘Auld Lang
Syne.’ At the Gymkhana, the music
stopped playing at midnight, the lights were switched off and then switched on again
to mark the start of the New Year. But
I would have been in bed long before that, having been put to bed at seven.
I shared a bedroom with my sister. We both had single beds. Marion
objected to my habit when I was four or five of waking her up by peeing into a
potty placed for that purpose under my bed.
Eventually I learned to visit the bathroom and WC next to our room,
which was situated at the side of the house.
She objected to quite a lot, and described herself to me as a ‘very
bossy’ little girl. At a birthday party
she objected so strongly to other little girls playing with her presents that
she had to be locked in our bedroom.
She also used to correct my manners and appearance, telling me to do up
a button or tie up a shoelace and say ‘Yes, please’ and ‘Thank you’.
There was a punkah in the ceiling of our
bedroom and we were instructed by our mother to ensure that our middles were
always covered by a sheet – stomachs mustn’t catch cold. We pulled our sheets over our heads when the
occasional bat flew in through the barred but open window. Sometimes we slept under mosquito nets, but
mosquitos, and malaria, were not a Karachi
problem. In the bathroom cockroaches
scuttled along a drain that led from the sink to under the bath and small
lizards flicked over walls. Ants were a
pest, and everything edible, especially jam, butter and sugar, had to be
covered if left on a table.
My parents had a large bedroom at the
front, with a large tiled bathroom beside it.
Our flat was on the first floor, on the left as you looked at Variawa
House from the front. The house was
divided into four flats, with a central wide and dark wooden staircase with a
landing, which then divided into two separate flights leading up to the first
floor.
On entering our flat through a big dark
wooden door, you walked into an enclosed verandah with patterned tiles on the
floor and furnished with wicker chairs, plants and, for a time, a sizeable cage
with wooden bars, which contained a mix of little sparrow-like rice-birds,
cheeping and hopping about. The
verandah overlooked the fairly formal, dusty, front garden. Turning
to your right you entered the sitting-room through one of two arched
doorways. This was a spacious room,
with a high ceiling and an ornate Indian red patterned carpet on the tiled floor. Side
tables, with brass tops, stood by the sofa and armchairs, and in a cabinet were
various Indian ornaments, family photos, and sandalwood and ivory carvings of
animals like elephants and deer. Two white pillars, with a folding screen of some
dark green material between them separated the sitting-room from the
dining-room beyond, which had row of windows, usually shut, overlooking the
courtyard and servants’ quarters at the back.
In addition to the wind-up gramophone on a table, there was an upright
piano in the dining-room, which my father played now and then, and on which Marion practised her
exercises and scales.
A spiral iron staircase led down to the
godown or courtyard at the back of the house and near the top of the spiral was
the hot and odorous kitchen. Apart from
here, and the bathrooms, punkahs in all the ceilings fanned the air, cooling it
down, and in the summer they were on full blast, humming rhythmically as they
span around.
The flat was rented from a Parsee family
who lived in the other half of the building.
We never met, socially or otherwise.
The flat below us was occupied by a British couple called the Geldards. At the front of the house there were tall
trees inhabited by a brain-fever bird, a type of cuckoo, which had a rising
three-note call. Gaudy, chattering
parrots flew about and brown kites and the occasional vulture circled high
overhead. Shrubs and flowering plants
in pots lined the drive and more potted plants sat on the steps to the entrance
to the house. The driveway was entered by one of two open gates
and arched around to the steps. We once
had a car, but because petrol was rationed when the war began and was expensive,
it was sold. My father, who was a sales
manager, was given a lift to and from his office at Standard Vac by a
colleague. In the Bath Island
area, my mother, Marion and I got about on foot, or on our bicycles, or in a
gharry. North of us was a railway line,
and a road bridge took us over it to the Sind Club, the Gymkhana, and into
town.
I learned to ride a bicycle when I was
about six. I didn’t use it much, less
so after I nearly crashed. Once on the
way back from Clifton, a southern suburb above a
long beach, the
brakes on my bicycle failed. I plummeted down the hill and across the
maidan, clinging to the handle-bars and hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much when I
crashed. The bicycle remained upright
and I was able to run it onto the maidan and slow it down.
A photo of my sister on a bicycle, taken
in 1941, has been inscribed on the back by my mother, ‘Marion eleven years old
on her Birthday present. She goes to
school on it and carries books in the basket.’ When Marion arrived back in Karachi in
September 1940, she went for a year to Miss Hickie’s War School – by which time
Miss Hickie had retired -- and then to St Joseph’s Convent School for Girls in
the Sadaar District. Every weekday a
group of girls used to assemble in Bath
Island Road and cycle to the school and back. St
Joseph’s had been founded by Belgian nuns in 1862 and
its buildings, as well as the number of its pupils, had expanded over the
years. It also had ample sports
facilities and very fine gardens. Out
of doors at lunch-breaks, the girls had to be careful, as hawks would swoop
down and take the sandwiches out of their hands.
Most of the girls were Anglo-Indians. Some were Polish girls, who had fled overland
with their mothers when the Germans invaded Poland. Marion
was taught sewing and crochet and was given piano lessons by a Scottish
nun. She excelled at this, passing the
required five grades of exams. She
played the piano at school concerts and sometimes played the piano for the
hymns sung in the school chapel. She
also played tennis and netball, the latter being watched later on, and cheered,
by American troops sitting on a wall – some of them were billeted nearby. American soldiers and airmen didn’t appear
in Karachi until early in 1942, after the Japanese
had bombed Pearl Harbour in December the previous year.
Apart from concerts, the school put on
plays, and I recall seeing my sister, aged 15 or so, playing Theseus in a
lavish all-girl production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was all very mystifying to me, especially
the language. But the costumes were
colourful, and there were fairies and some comical characters with funny names.
Who would ever have guessed that nearly
20 years later I would be playing one of Theseus’s attendants in a Royal
Shakespeare Company production of The Dream at the Aldwych Theatre in London? And one night we performed before the Queen
and Queen Mother and the King and Queen of Greece.
On the few occasions when Marion and I
went into town with our mother, we were conveyed thither in a gharry. An open, horse-drawn four-wheeled carriage,
it had a folded awning which could be raised to enclose us if it rained, but
usually we sat there like royalty, while the driver perched on a seat up front,
behind the horse, which apart from defecating before our eyes while trotting
along, used to let fly with fulsome farts.
Gharrys were much used by the Americans, who treated them like taxis.
Any cars were garaged in the godown, in
what used to be stables, facing inwards on either side of the yard behind
houses like Variawa. The first floor and
some of the ground floor spaces served as the servants’ quarters, where
families lived and ate and washed themselves at taps. They slept on charpoys, low wooden framed
beds with an interlacing woven support as a mattress. Here and there were splashes like dried
blood on the ground, caused by Indians who chewed betel leaves and then spat
out the saliva-soaked remnants. How the
servants lived was a matter of some curiosity to a child, but fraternisation
was generally not encouraged.
I don’t recall any Indian businessmen ever
coming to our flat for drinks. The only
Indians allowed inside were sellers of silks, ornaments and bales of cloth, who
peddled their wares, by bicycle, from house to house. A Chinese salesman, with bags full of
embroidered items, like tablecloths, mats, silk handkerchiefs, scarves and
female underwear visited now and then.
He would ring his bicycle bell outside the house and be invited up to
display his wares on our verandah. A knife-sharpener also came to the house. All the Indians with whom I had any social
interaction were ayahs, servants or tradesmen. I was aware, however, that my father dealt
with some Indian men in the way of business and was entertained by them. Some of these Indians sent us huge baskets
of fruit, dates and nuts at Christmas.
Sometimes small gifts, like watches, were secreted within.
On one occasion my mother, making
conversation, remarked that an Indian salesman had wonderful white teeth. Saying, ‘Yes, jolly good,’ he took them out
and showed them to her.
I had more than one ayah when I was
young. Apart from washing and dressing
me -- my mother it was who bathed me – the ayah accompanied me on visits to the
Gymkhana, to my kindergarten, to social gatherings and to parties, consorting
with other ayahs while I played with the other children. If I was ill, the ayah would sleep on the
floor outside the bedroom door. My last
nanny was the attractive young wife of a British NCO. Called
Merle, she may have been Anglo-Indian, although she was pale-skinned and didn’t
have an Indian accent. But she didn’t
last very long.
Anglo-Indians, especially the women, were
sometimes referred to, disparagingly, as chi-chi, which apparently characterised
the sing-song way they usually talked.
We had three permanent servants and shared
three others with the other people in the flats – the dhobi, who did all the
laundry, the mali
or gardener, who wandered about watering the bushes and all the plants in pots
with an outsize watering-can, and a dherzi, who dealt with anything requiring
sewing and repairs to clothes and linen.
They were paid very little, even the dhobi, who provided households with
fresh linen every day.
Our chief servant was the bearer, a sort of
butler, who was paid about 40 rupees a month.
He had a grey moustache, wore a white turban and was always dressed in
white. His name was Jairam. He was well-spoken, serious and respectful,
without ever being obsequious. Our
hamal, or housekeeper, was shorter than Jairam. He was moustached and turbaned, more solidly
built and wore loose clothing and sandals.
His name I can’t recall. He did
all the cleaning, polishing, sweeping and dusting. He also made the beds, changed the sheets,
and swabbed and disinfected the floors.
Ants were dealt with, and flies ensnared by strips of sticky paper hung
in strategic places. Wasps and hornets
could be a menace and liked building their nests in ceiling corners. Marion
was once stung by a wasp that fell down the back of her dress.
Our
cook, or mistri, who was clean-shaven and younger than the other two, had very
dark skin -- he must have come from southern India. In his small hot kitchen at the back, where
there was a clay oven, heated by glowing charcoal, he showed me how to make
chapathis. He made all our meals, and
the meal I remember most is our Sunday lunch, when he served a tasty chicken
pilau, with white rice, raisins and nuts and a thin but spicy tomato
sauce. Mulligatawny soup and chicken
broth also feature in my memories – and desserts like trifles and queen
puddings (a meringue concoction), fruit baskets (with handles) made of toffee, also
scooped-out oranges filled with orange jelly, and ice-creams topped with
wafers. At bridge parties and cold
suppers jellied tomato soup was served, along with corn and prawn frittesr,
plates of tongue, canned asparagus and potato chips. Some items, like tea, flour, butter and
sugar were rationed during the war but not noticeably so, as the portions
permitted were quite substantial. Food
prices were very low. Bananas,
according to Mrs Hankinson, were practically given away. A pineapple, she said, cost six annas, and a
chicken twelve.
I was the chota sahib (small master) to
the servants. My mother was the
memsahib and my father the sahib, even the burra sahib (big or important
master). A pukka sahib was a real or
proper gentleman – pukka originally meant ‘baked’ and was applied to the solid
bricks with which many Indian buildings were constructed when there was no
stone. In their way our servants were
devoted to us, and my parents relied on them a good deal and trusted them
implicitly. My mother was not worried
at all about me being harmed or even molested by any Indian – they were very
kind and good with children of whatever race – and I was allowed to roam about
the neighbourhood, with or without other children. I was in fact more in danger from
Anglo-Saxon, older boys. She was mainly
concerned about rabid dogs and that I wore a topee, didn’t get sunstroke, and
didn’t drink unboiled water.
I learned some Indian words, including
some swear words, and could count up to ten.
I don’t recall any words for ‘Thank you’ and ‘Please’.
Indian festivals, like the Hindu Diwali,
with its exploding crackers and fireworks, were eye-catching and exciting. Colourful crowds passed our back yard and the
servants’ quarters, parading along Clifton
Road. Guy
Fawkes Night was celebrated at the Gymkhana with a firework display.
It’s almost impossible to be precise about
the dates of events in my childhood, even to say how old I was at a particular
time. Photos in family albums help. But between the ages of three and nine,
images that have stayed with me and surface even now are effused with a
sunshine that cast no shadows. Every
new day replaced what had gone before.
The only constant was me, although I was changing as the days and months
passed, growing up without a thought, taken up and taken in by everything that
happened, gazing with wide-eyed innocence at the world I saw. There was a war, and millions were dying,
but all that was somewhere else.
In 1939 when war was declared, I was
three. It hardly impinged on my
childhood, apart from the plethora of tinned, mostly American foods, and the
collections we children were urged to make for the War Effort, whatever that
was, of bottle-tops and tin cans and silver paper. Men in uniform were to be seen at clubs and
in the town. The Americans were popular
when they began invading Karachi
in 1942 because they gave families gifts of food and drink and cigarettes, and
had sweets and packets of chewing-gum for the children. They established their own air-base at Mauripur,
sharing it with the RAF. Operational
from 1943, it eventually became the main air-base of the Pakistan Air Force and
was renamed Masroor.
Some
American officers used to visit our flat. But I
never connected them, or the British troops, with events elsewhere. Europe
meant nothing to me. Somewhere called Burma
meant something – it was somewhere near India, though still a million miles
from our blue horizons. Some people
called the Japs, whoever they were, were seemingly to be feared. But the grown-ups’ talk was remote and
generally meaningless, about the war and virtually everything. I was too young and active to listen to the
wireless, although I responded to the melodies and songs I overheard.
I
learned to read early on, but I never read newspapers or magazines, just comics,
like Superman and Captain Marvel. Their
colourful covers had a silky feel and a distinct, indefinable aroma. The childrens’ books, with pictures, that I
perused the most were those about Little Grey Rabbit by Alison Uttley, and
Babar the Elephant, and the Tales of Beatrix Potter. Pigling Bland was my favourite, followed by
Samuel Whiskers and Timmy Tiptoes, and of course there was the adventurous
Little Pig Robinson. Years later pigs
and piglets aroused an ecstatic reaction in me, derived, I think, from my
mother’s tickling game when I was very young that started with my fingers or
toes, ‘This little pig went to market,’ and ended with me squealing as the last
little pig ‘went wee-wee-wee all the way home.’
Later on I read the magical Wind in the
Willows, and whatever books I could find about Richmal Crompton’s William,
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle, and the Biggles
of Captain WE Johns. Most of these
stories were set in an England
which was eternally sunny and where it never rained, and featured a magical English
countryside, English towns and villages, English animals, and the whiteness of
snow. Whether these tales animated my
imagination and sparked a fascination with words, and the telling of stories, I
do not know. But before I left India I had
written several very basic childish poems and Chapter One of a story called
Mole.
Why I did so is a mystery to me. Where did the impulse to write and an
intense interest in anything to do with matters artistic come from – and an
innate and compulsive urge to create something? Neither of my parents was scholarly, and
although my mother was a talented painter and my father played the piano and
his mother a mandolin – and I had an aunt who sang and danced and a great-uncle
who was an actor – this was not unusual.
Families used to rely on each other for entertainment. They sang, they played the piano and other
instruments; they recited poems and danced; they performed in amateur productions;
and they read a lot.
An avid reader myself, I was also
entranced by the films I saw. There was
a cinema across the road from the Sind Club.
I was taken by my mother to see the special sad magic of Disney’s films,
like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi ,
which were all released during the war.
And there was the utterly wondrous The Wizard of Oz, which reached India in
1940. All these entertainments were
enhanced by memorable songs and music.
Music of a different sort featured in A Song to Remember, shown in
1945. It was what’s now called a
biopic about the pianist and composer, Frederic Chopin, who died of TB when he
was 39. I well remember, towards the
end of the film when Cornel Wilde as Chopin was playing, passionately, the
Polonaise in A Flat Major, the vivid image of a drop of red blood splashing
onto the white keys between his hands.
Some of the songs I liked, to which I
responded, were White Christmas and Beyond the Blue Horizon, which had a
haunting melody and lyrics that might have applied to me – ‘Beyond the blue
horizon waits a beautiful day … I see a new horizon; my life has only begun;
beyond the blue horizon lies the rising sun.’
This was sung in the 1944 film, Follow the Boys, in the high thin
soprano of Jeannette McDonald. Another
song I remember from 1945 was Can’t Help Singing, sung by Deanna Durbin in the
film of that name. I would sometimes play records on the gramophone
on a table in a corner of our dining-room, and dance around the dinner table to
The Waltz of the Flowers and jig about to Jealousy. When even older and at school in Edinburgh I enjoyed
Scottish country dancing at seasonal dances and performing on stage in school
productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But I never had any official lessons in
acting, signing or dancing.
Cinema-going was a fairly regular
event. Shows began at 7.0 pm and we had
to book, as for a theatre, in advance.
We didn’t mix with the Indians.
The whites-only section was in effect a dress circle, where we sat on
couches, with the Indians on chairs down below. They would clatter out noisily at the end,
while a scratchy record of ‘God Save the Queen’ was played and the whites all
dutifully stood to attention facing the screen. My mother was somewhat indifferent to what
I saw – although I saw all the Disney films and The Wizard of Oz. I also saw what she wanted to see. Sitting beside her in the dark, I was agog
at the dramatic, mind-boggling and emotional mysteries of such films that were
released in India during the war, like Eagle Squadron, Wake Island, the
marvellous Mrs Miniver, and that most engrossing epic movie, Gone with the
Wind. During the latter, when my mother thought I
had had enough at the interval and suggested we leave, I apparently said to
her, ‘You can go if you like, but I’m staying!’
War, as shown in these last four films,
was clearly very dangerous and destructive, and people were killed. In fact all the heroic American defenders of
Wake Island died in the film, blown up by
Japanese bombs. But I didn’t associate
anything of what I saw in the cinema with what was really happening in the
world elsewhere. Bad people called
Germans and Japs were the killers in the WW2 films, but there weren’t any in Karachi, and the
combatants in Gone with the Wind were fighting long ago. Besides, they looked nothing like the
friendly Americans who visited our flat.
The
fact that I had already starred in my father’s films at the age of one and that
he had a ciné-projector at home that showed an assortment of short black and
white films, may have inculcated a life-long liking for movies. But it was the life-like people and places in
the films that grabbed me, the drama of their lives, which also had a beginning
and an end.
My father’s short films on large round reels,
which included some Pathé Gazettes, were now and then taken by him to be shown
to ill and injured soldiers in the military hospital. More often they were shown at parties, to
children squatting on the big sitting-room carpet at our home. Mickey
Mouse cartoons ensured hilarity. But
for me the best were not the films featuring Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton,
but the Charlie Chaplin films, like The Cure, and above all, The Gold
Rush. The films were shown on a pull-up
silvered screen set on the sofa parked between the two pillars in the middle of
the room. We children sat on the floor with
our backs to the verandah, to my father and the loudly whirring projector which
he’d set on a table, while its flickering light streamed over our heads and
black and white figures cavorted on the screen.
Toys weren’t played with much, although I
had a train set, whose trains ran in a monotonous circle, and some Dinky toys,
cars and racing cars that could be crashed.
My companion was a small white Rupert bear and I think I also had a
large yellow bear. But I never had many
stuffed toys, not as many as Christopher Robin, whose stories I liked, as well
as the poems about him.
Playing with my toys was confined to the
bedroom. One day, when retrieving a toy
from under a piece of furniture, which had to be moved to one side, I uncovered
a large grey corpse-like spider on the wall.
That was very scary. A snake didn’t
bother me when seen in the garden as it was dead -- nor did the bats that
sometimes flew into our bedroom through the open window. I used to study the march of ants across the
tiled floor and tried to reroute them, also to distract them with offerings of
dead flies.
I liked animals and talked to them. I still do.
My first pet was a white rabbit.
This may have had something to do with the rabbits in the tales of
Beatrix Potter and Alison Uttley. The
rabbit was kept in a hutch outside our flat (because it smelled) on top of the
small porch above the communal entrance, and it was allowed out to scamper
about and explore the flat. Who fed it
and cleaned the hutch I do not know. It
wasn’t me. One day my mother noticed
that the rabbit was pulling a piece of cloth, perhaps a duster, along the tiled
floor, and kept on impeding its progress by standing on the cloth. She and Marion followed the rabbit to the
boxroom, where all our cases and other items were stored, and found that a hole
had been gnawed in one of the cases. The
rabbit was building a nest inside. Her
nest was moved into the hutch and here the rabbit gave birth to two babies,
whom she made more at home by padding the nest with white fur taken from her
chest. In due course the rabbit and
her young disappeared, as all my pets did.
They were replaced by a kitten, which soon
became less cuddly and turned into a feral tom. He spent most of the time out of doors, and
his yowling at night and the fights he had annoyed our neighbours, who
complained. When we left Karachi, my mother took
him to the Zoo, where he was supposed to be employed as a mouser. She cycled there with the cat plonked in the
basket hanging from the handle-bars, and all the way he sat there facing her,
gazing up at her accusingly and reproachfully. Poor Tom.
When I was very young, I used to clap my
hands and bang a spoon on the tray of my high chair when food arrived. An extension of this was the habit I
developed of rubbing my hands together, with my mouth open, in anticipation of
a meal – something I used to do for many years, even into my twenties.
One
early memory is of my sister being slapped.
The four of us were having
breakfast on the verandah when Marion,
aged about 10, said something cheeky, whereupon my father slapped her
face. Crying, she fled, and I also had
to be led away, as I burst into tears, whether in sympathy or out of fear I do
not know. Probably the former, as my
father was not physically or verbally abusive.
He once told my mother, when she was protecting me from chastisement
after I had committed some misdemeanour, ‘You’re like a tigress with your
young.’
One weekend, however, he chased me around
the house with a leather razor-strop in his hand – he used a cut-throat razor
to shave – because I’d been naughty.
There were paths and plants down the sides of the house and I’d been
making mud-pies with a playmate, Joan Bebbington. The earth around the plants must have been
recently watered by the mali
and was easily reshaped into mud-pies or balls.
Our natural urge was of course to
throw them. This we did, at the wall of
the ground floor flat, which must have been stuccoed as they stuck there very
agreeably. But, alas, somebody’s aim --
it must have been Joan’s -- went amiss, and a mud-ball flew through the open
window of a ground-floor bathroom. I
believe it landed in a bath, and Mrs Geldard may even have been in it. We fled, and when Mr Geldard went upstairs
to complain, my father sought me out to punish me. Thus the chase around Variawa House. But he
didn’t catch me and nothing more was done. The tigress must have snarled. But I feel sure my parents would have
laughed about it afterwards.
I
fled another time, when a doctor came to vaccinate me, to scratch my upper arm
with a needle and then inject some vaccine against cholera or smallpox. I hated such violence being done to my small
person. I struggled and fought and
cried most bitterly when I had to submit.
Vaccinations and inoculations were almost annual when I was small, and
as needles were thicker in those days I developed a horror of needles, and
doctors, which lasted a very long time.
This aversion wasn’t eased by my medical
misfortunes, the first of which was when I had my tonsils and adenoids removed.
Whether I had throat infections or other
symptoms, like breathing through my mouth, I don’t know. But I remember being taken to a nursing-home
run by French-Canadian nuns and invited by one of them to see if I could climb
onto a long white table. If I did I’d
be rewarded, she said, with a sweet.
When I succeeded, trustingly, I was invited to lie down, and instantly a
damp pad was clamped over my mouth and nose.
Chloroformed, I passed out, and
awoke in a strange bed with a very sore throat. There was red blood on the pillow. I had never seen blood before, and it was
mine.
After about ten days I recovered. My body has always mended quickly and
well. Perhaps it was because my tonsils
and adenoids were removed that my voice was given a clarity and resonance that
would later be deemed suitable for reading the television news.
Another nasty experience was when I was
smitten at the same time by whooping-cough and measles when I was about four or
five. I was very ill. I remember lying in a tented cot in my parents’
bedroom, feeling very hot, feverish and uncomfortable and coughing
convulsively. This seemed to last forever. Marion
was told to be very quiet. Her friend,
Margaret Hutchison, who lived at number 2, contracted whooping-cough at the
same time. Mrs Hutchison told me that
Margaret had a temperature of 107º. She
blamed the illness on the diseases brought out by children evacuated from England in the
summer of 1940, before the Battle of Britain.
Yet another unpleasantness, a few years
later, was when I had a stye under an eye-lid, caused, it was thought, by a
bacterial infection picked up when I was cooling off with some other boys in a
water tank in Government House, where there must have been some social function
to which children were invited. These
tanks – every house had one -- were used by the malis to water their garden. The stye had to be cauterised by a blue
object that was rubbed against it by a doctor, and this meant the upper eye-lid
had to be pulled inside out. All
somewhat painful. This entailed several
visits to the doctor and this time I didn’t make a fuss, possibly because I was
older. At any rate my mother and sister
were impressed and thought I was very brave.
For a time I also had worms. These grew from parasites that lodged in the
intestines and fed from what they found there.
This had several side-effects, including irritability, restlessness and
diarrhoea. The main one was a low blood count, anaemia,
and I became quite pale and even thinner.
Marion
was instructed by my mother not to tell anyone that I was thus afflicted. The worm, or worms -- they were much longer
than earth-worms -- had to be slaughtered inside me by pills or medicines and
their thin white corpses evacuated by the only possible exit.
Growing up in India
seldom guaranteed good health, though malaria was not a problem in Karachi. For some reason boys were thought to be more
susceptible than girls to the climate and the various diseases that could be
caught. And then one day I nearly
drowned.
It was the custom at weekends for
grown-ups to head for the beach when not enjoying the amenities of the various
clubs. Laden with food and drink in
ice-boxes and hampers, families and their children would drive north out of
Karachi and around to Hawkes Bay, or get a bunda-boat at Keamari, a large boat
with sails, which was crewed by two fishermen and took us across the harbour to
Sandspit, the lengthy sand-bar that connected Manora Island to the
mainland. There, as at Hawkes Bay,
wooden beach huts dotted the sandy ridge above the beach. The 14-mile drive to Hawkes Bay,
which didn’t become popular until 1936, was quite bumpy and dusty, as dry
riverbeds had to be crossed and their banks unsteadily descended and
ascended. The road also passed by the
squalid, smelly settlements where poorer Indians lived in ramshackle huts on
the fringes of the town.
Most of the roomy beach-huts of the
British were owned by various banks and companies and loaned to employees. Some
could be rented. The Maish family, who
lived next door to us, in the right-hand ground-floor flat of number 3, had
their own hut at Buleji, near a fishing village further along the coast beyond Hawkes Bay.
These sunny days and weekend outings by
the sea were much enjoyed by everyone.
We would spend the day or even a night (if there were bunks), roughing
it without any servants, and picnicking during the war years on tins of corned
beef, beetroot, pears and peaches, all favourites of mine. The adults ate, smoked, drank beer and
whisky, played cards, went for walks, and swam. Some of the men might hire a boat and go
fishing out at sea. Apart from an
afternoon siesta, we children were out of doors most of the time, digging holes
in the sand under the hut, where it was cooler, and making sand-castles on the
beach that faced the incoming salty, foaming waves of the Indian
Ocean. I must have been
about five or six and hadn’t as yet been taught how to swim. I would paddle in the warm, frothy waters,
my head protected from the sun by a topee, and my little boy’s skinny frame
clad in a one-piece swimsuit. Mounds of
stranded translucent jelly-fish could be found on the shore and strange dead
fish, and the bluish remains of Portuguese men of war. Playful porpoises occasionally appeared
beyond the waves. Sometimes we came
across a turtle’s nest and their buried eggs.
Drunk or brutish young men made a sport of turning turtles onto their
backs.
Once I paddled out too far in the salty
water. The waves came in on top of each
other now and then, but there were also wide gaps of calmer water between them. Suddenly a wall of frothing water swept
towards me. I turned but was overwhelmed
and dragged away in the undertow and disappeared. All that the adults saw was my topee
floating on the water. They dashed into
the sea -- led by my mother I expect.
Found and rescued, choking and gasping, I was carried ashore, screaming
blue murder when I could.
This happened before I was seven years
old, as did the episodes of whooping cough and measles, the extraction of my
tonsils and adenoids and bouts of coughs and colds. The stye and worms occurred when I was seven
or eight. My late educational start was
probably occasioned by my various medical mishaps, as I didn’t go to school
until I was five or six. Before that,
using children’s books and stories, my mother must have taught me to read, to
draw and write.
The school was a kindergarten, run by two
women, sisters I think, a Miss Norah Rogers, who was rather scrawny, and a
plumper Mrs Shelagh Carter. The
school-room was in a front room of their home near the railway line and on the
other side of Clifton Road,
not far from us. An ayah accompanied me
there and back. Lessons, such as they
were, only took place in the morning and included reading, writing, arithmetic
and the colouring of picture-books.
About ten of us children, boys and girls, had to learn multiplication tables
by heart and recite them in unison. We
also learned how to write by copying copperplate exemplars and manipulated toy bricks
and plasticine. Games were played in
Mrs Carter’s garden, mostly ball games, and we also had to circle about,
holding hands, enacting ‘Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of posies, all
fall down.’
Among the boys at the kindergarten was Mrs
Carter’s son, Peter Carter, boisterous and badly behaved; hyper-active Johnny
Walker, brother of Alison Walker, Marion’s best
friend; Jerry Mahon,
a small, pale, frail and skinny boy; and Michael Cummings, who was unsmiling
and slightly evil. Later on there was a
slow, solid boy who when asked what he had for breakfast said he’d had eggy for
breakfast. He was known as ‘Eggy’ after
that.
Although we lived near the school, it took
about half an hour for us to trail back across Clifton Road with our ayahs. The more energetic boys, like Johnny Walker,
would throw stones at lamp-posts, trees, and pi-dogs, at chokras and each other. Johnny was much more adventurous than me and
would cycle all over the place, even into town. He visited his servants’ quarters so often
he was able to speak Urdu. He would
cycle to Clifton
across the maidan, where goats were pastured, where cricket was played and
kites were flown on windy days. At
night-time pi-dogs howled mournfully there.
Another place for play was the crumbling
sandy hillock of Bath
Island, which we turned
into a fortress, with defenders and attackers, and bombarded each other with
paper bags filled with sand. We had no
pistols or bows and arrows, and never played using imaginary ones or took part
in imaginary wars. The only weapons
owned by some boys were catapults, used to zap cats and dogs and birds in
trees.
I
was at the kindergarten for three years, after which I may have had a private
tutor, so that I wouldn’t be too far behind when starting school in Scotland. I should have gone to the Grammar School in
the city, like the other boys, but my mother wasn’t keen on the imagined rough
and tumble of the school, nor of its distance from where we lived. The children with whom I associated and
played were neighbours’ children or children of my parents’ friends, like Jane
and Billy Maish, who lived in number 3 next door, and Johnny Walker, Jerry
Mahon and Michael Cummings, who all lived in Mary Road or Bath Island
Road. I used to play with Jane rather than with Billy,
as he was almost three years older than me.
He was a Grammar School boy and later on was a boarder at the Breeks Memorial
School in Ootacamund, a hill-station
in the Nilgeri Hills in southern India. In
pretended domesticity Jane and I made houses out of chairs and tablecloths or
bedcovers on the back verandah of her ground-floor flat. We probably
also had pretend tea-parties and meals.
Board games, like Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, were popular, as well as
drawing and filling in colouring books.
Other occasional playmates, like the
children of the Goodhands and the Godberts, lived further away, as did girls
like Joan Bebbington and Phyllida Priestley.
Although my mother and father called
me Ronald, the children called me Ronnie. But more about some of them later.
Our neighbours in Bath Island Road varied. The
Hutchisons – he was an accountant -- lived for a time in number 2. They
had a daughter about Marion’s
age called Margaret. Yule Rennie and
his wife lived for a while in a flat below them. Helen Johnson and her husband, Johnny
Johnson, who were the best friends of Margaret Hankinson and her husband, were
in number 3, as were Frank and Nancy Maish, the parents of Billy and Jane. Their
surname, of German origin, was pronounced ‘Maysh’. The
Cummings family were briefly in number 2.
Below us in number 4 were Ruth and Ronnie
Geldard. He worked for BOAC. Helen Johnson, who was Greek, spoke several
languages and played the piano, was a friend of Ruth Geldard. She told me in a letter that Ruth, a wealthy
American, was not a happy woman as her husband was so jealous. They had no children until after the war,
when a boy and girl were born. The
marriage eventually failed altogether and divorce proceedings were underway
when Ronnie Geldard, now with BOAC in Beirut,
persuaded his wife, who was in England,
to pay him a visit and bring the children with her. Because of his employment by BOAC he was
able to get good seats for them on one of the new jet-liners, a Comet, and in
January 1954 they returned to England
on another Comet, Flight 781. It never
arrived. After leaving Rome
the Comet broke apart in mid-air, bits of it crashing into the Mediterranean
off the Italian island
of Elba. All 35
people on board were killed – ten of the 29 passengers were children.
Another family tragedy involved the
brother of Nancy Maish, Jerry Bolton, the government’s chief accountant in Sind. He was
taking his family on holiday to a hill-station, Srinagar, in a chauffeur-driven car. On a dark and rainy day there was some kind
of mishap or accident and the car plunged down a ramp beside a bridge into a fast-flowing
river. Jerry Bolton managed to push his
pregnant wife out of the passenger door.
She survived, but he, his three
little girls and their ayah were all drowned.
Twice my mother, Marion and I travelled by
train and local bus to hill-stations in the north of India to escape the humid heat of
summer. I don’t think my father was with us on the
second occasion. He had to work, to
keep the family in the style of living to which my mother had become
accustomed. Another reason for the
family’s sojourn in the north may have been because the Japanese had invaded Burma in 1942, had taken Rangoon and overrun the country. The Allied armies had retreated into India and there were fears that an attack on India, even an
invasion, would be next. My father was
co-opted for the equivalent of the Home Guard, the Sind Rifles, and promoted to
full Lieutenant and then Captain towards the end of the war.
Our first trip was in 1942, when I was
nearly six. We went to Naini Tal, which
was in the high foot-hills of the Himalayas, near the border with Nepal. This involved a hot and dusty, wearisome
three-day journey across India
by train. There were none of the lush jungles of
Kipling’s stories, nothing but mile upon mile of beige scrub and desert dotted
with ramshackle, huddled villages, with thorn trees and emaciated oxen pulling
ploughs, and kites and vultures wheeling in a white-hot sky. The engines, fired up by coal, were huge
black steaming monsters, belching smoke, with shrill whistles that sounded
often -- when starting and stopping, when clanking through villages and when
there was a cow on the line. If the cow
didn’t move, the whole train came to a halt and had to wait, hissing, until it did.
We had pull-down bunks in our first-class
compartment and took some food and drink with us in an ice-box, though bottled
drinks and fruit like bananas could be bought from platform vendors, who moved
along the train as it stood in a station.
When it did, we would get out and
stretch our legs. There was also a
restaurant car. When we went there, in
our absence an attendant would refill the ice-tub and in the evening pull down
and make up our bunks. At the end of
each coach was a smelly thunderbox in a cupboard. On this journey we probably changed trains
at Delhi.
The railway stations were always crowded,
and Indians packed into their carriages and sometimes clung to the outside or
sat on the roof. At stops where the
train refuelled with coal and water, swift monkeys were a menace, especially at
Bareilly,
seeking snacks and adept at snatching small objects. Three-layered compartment windows, with
glass, mesh and shutters, had to be closed.
This made the compartments even hotter and more stuffy, though a
primitive sort of air-conditioning was provided by a flimsy overhead punkah
fanning tubs containing a block of ice in a tub on the floor between the seats.
Crossing rivers by iron bridges was
riveting, as the slow-moving muddy brown rivers were so wide, the bridges so
narrow, and it took so long to reach the other shore. The Indus was traversed more than once, as
well as the upper reaches of the Ganges.
I remember the names of two stations
beyond the Ganges – Bareilly
and Kathgodam. The latter was at the
end of the line. We spent the night
there in the house of one of my parents’ acquaintances. I don’t know what he did, but there were
snakes in glass jars of formaldehyde and other scary objects. I slept uneasily in a big bed under a
voluminous mosquito net and could hear the mosquitos’ evil song as they
hungrily hovered outside.
From Kathgodam we travelled in a hired car up
to Naini Tal along winding roads, with hair-pin bends and steep drops. Marion
urged our mother to look at the view.
‘Look down!’ she cried, and more than once the car had to stop to let
Louie be sick. The town itself was banked on mountain slopes
on three sides of a large dark lake and surrounded by pine forests. The air was clean and fresh. We were there, in a high colonial hotel with
verandahs, for about two months, during which a small tough-looking boy called
John made friends with me and I had riding lessons on a horse. So did Marion.
I didn’t feel safe on a horse, nor all
that safe with little John. I’ve never
liked horses, mainly because of their extraordinary shape, their spindly legs,
their crazy eyes, their wilfulness and stupidity. I bumped along uncomfortably – I was very
thin -- on the back of the horse and was glad when I was lifted off.
Little John got me into trouble more than
once. But the only mischief I recall
was when we tried on some of my mother’s garments, hats and shoes. She discovered us thus attired and after a
scolding probably laughed a lot.
Going for walks through the silent pine
forests was what one did at Naini Tal.
There was little for the adults to do in the evenings, apart from
playing bridge, Monopoly and Mah Jong.
At the end of one walk was a small spectral lake with a sinister black
surface set in a secluded valley.
Leeches lurked there and secretly attached themselves to you and
disgustingly drank your blood, until salt was poured on them to make them let
go. Here I learned how to skip flat
stones along the still surface of the water.
The forested valley also had an echo, and I think my father must have
been with us for a short time, as it was probably he who showed me how to skip
the stones and hid himself and startled me with an echo … ‘Hallooooo.’
Marion
remembered that our mother was fond of repeating what I had once said on one of
these excursions. Some little girl
remarked that when she grew up she was going to have several children. I said, no doubt with solemn conviction, ‘I’m
just going to have animals.’
Attending a Sunday school at Naini Tal was
something new to me. We children sat on
low chairs while a female teacher told or read New Testament stories about
gentle Jesus. No doubt we also sang
hymns. There were elements in the
stories, however, that didn’t make sense to me, like the miracles, angels and
God, and that this Jesus had died but was still alive and all around us, even
in the room. It also puzzled me that
this tall, long-haired and bearded white man – no man I’d met had long hair and
a beard -- had something called a halo attached to his head, wore a white
nightie and was Jewish. He was nothing
like the few Jews I’d met – my sister had a Jewish friend called Wendy, the
daughter of a judge. And why was this
man so fond of lambs and little children of different colours? He seemed to be a sort of magician who
performed what were called miracles. He
had no more reality than Pigling Bland and much less charm. But the stories about him were quite
dramatic.
There were parties and amateur variety
concerts in Naini Tal. At one concert Marion was persuaded to
sing, with some other girls, a song with a curious chorus that began
‘Cab-bages, ca-beans and car-rots.’
There was also a cinema in the town.
My mother had been alarmed by bangs and shouting issuing from the bazaar
down below. But one afternoon, she took
me and another little boy to see They Died With Their Boots On, starring Errol
Flynn. Returning to our hotel in a
gharry we encountered a noisy demonstration, mobs of men running about and
shouting. My mother raised the hood of
the gharry, shutting out the rioting crowds, though not the noise. It all meant less to me than the film, which
had been much more alarming and real. I
never thought of danger. For we were
British after all, invulnerable, as we had always been, and uninvolved.
Our second hill-station holiday was, I
think, in the summer of 1944. By this
time the Japanese were massed on the eastern border of India, posing
even more of a threat. In April they
had invaded Assam
and attacked Kohima and Imphal. This
time my mother, my sister and myself travelled as far as we could in the
opposite direction, to the Northwest Frontier Province
bordering Afghanistan. Again, the train journey was a long one and
several broad rivers were crossed, like the Jhelum and the Sutlej. In Lahore
we stayed for a day or so at the prestigious Faletti’s Hotel, established in
1880. It had big opulent rooms and
indoor palms, a banquet hall, and grandly garbed staff. There was a smelly Zoo in Lahore, which we visited, and in the
Botanical Gardens hundreds of large fruit-bats hung blackly upside down in
giant trees. It was fun to clap my hands and make them fly
away in swirling clouds before they returned to their roosts, noisily chattering
as they settled down.
After Lahore,
trains took us on to Rawalpindi and Peshawar, and thence to
Abbottabad which, as I discovered many years later, had been named after a
British army officer and administrator, James Abbott, who was born in 1807 and
joined the Bengal Artillery when he was 16.
He was the third of four sons and had five sons of his own (and two
daughters) and fought in several wars in the Punjab, eventually becoming Deputy
Commissioner of Hazara, the most northern part of the North West Frontier
Province. Much admired by the people and soldiery of
the local tribes, when he moved his HQ from Haripur in 1852, founding a town
further north, it was was given his name
Abbottabad in 1944 was a small nondescript
town surrounded by the low wooded hills of the lower Himalayas. I don’t remember much about it. To the east, at Kakul, was an Army base with
many tents in ordered rows occupied by the Gurkha Rifles. The hotel we were in had a swimming-pool, in
which I would have spent some time. Marion remembered
swimming in the pool in the rain and that a soldier drowned there. What I recall of Abbottabad has a
supernatural tinge.
Despite my doubting response to religious
instruction at the Sunday School in Naini Tal, in Abbotabad I began writing
notes to God. Some adult female,
probably not my mother, must have told me that my wishes – as with Santa Claus
– would be heard. These notes had to be
hidden in secret places, and these places happened to be under plant pots in
the gardens of the hotel, which were full of colourful zinnias. Magically, when I checked under a plant pot
the following morning to see whether my note had been received, it had
gone! Some heavenly agency, like an
angel, had taken it to God. He never
wrote back, which was disappointing, but that didn’t really matter, as I knew
my wishes had been heard.
It was only in Abbottabad that for a while
I believed. The doubts, verging on
disbelief, soon returned.
I know now that although I was never
spiritual or religious, I have always been susceptible to the negative or
positive impressions made by places and people, to vibrations or auras – call
them what you will. Perhaps an
atmosphere of wartime uncertainty and fear communicated itself to me in
Abbottabad. I wasn’t very playful or at ease there.
Fear certainly hit home when my mother,
careless about what films I saw, took me one afternoon to see King Kong. It was very frightening. That
night in my bedroom I had a waking nightmare, in which I imagined that the
gorilla’s huge face was outside the bedroom window, peering in. I’m
sure I must have cried out and that Marion, with whom I shared the bedroom,
must have been alarmed, as well as annoyed at being rudely awakened, and
fetched my mother. It was in Abbottabad
that she was also frightened by seeing another film, The Hound of the
Baskervilles.
I had a vivid imagination and this kind of
night-time terror would occur more than once later on. As it was, I had already seen and heard what
might be said to be ghosts. Is it
possible? Did I really see and hear
what I remember I saw and heard? And if
these things actually happened, what rational explanation for them can be found? In Karachi
there was a catalyst, as I think of him now, a small boy who attended my
kindergarten.
Michael Cummings was an odd boy. He once told me that the dinner-table chair
on which I was sitting had been wired and that I would be electrocuted if I
misbehaved or didn’t do as he wished.
Another time he got me to climb onto a chair and peer through a
fan-light into a bedroom where a woman, presumably his mother, was having a
siesta and exposing her rather large breasts.
He was one of those very English flaxen-haired boys with a high forehead
and very blue eyes. He was smaller than
me and we were both about six. I didn’t
much like him and only went to play with him as he lived nearby, in a
first-floor flat in number 2 similar to ours.
I didn’t see much of him.
According to a 1932 directory for Karachi,
his father was the City Deputy Collector (whatever that was) and, according to
Mrs Hutchison, not socially acceptable – he was black-balled at the Sind Club
and refused membership.
The
first incident didn’t involve blond Michael directly. We were chasing about, perhaps playing
hide-and-seek, and I opened a door that led to the sitting-room. At the other end of the room sunlight was
streaming obliquely across the verandah, through the arches. As the houses in Bath Island Road faced west, this must
have occurred in the late afternoon.
What I saw was a woman, what seemed to be a woman, standing in one of
the arches. I presumed it was a woman
as she seemed to be wearing a long dress that reached to the floor. But she had no features and no other details
were defined. She was like a grey
silhouette and the sunshine’s specks of light didn’t shine through her. The grey shape was blotting them out.
Startled at seeing what looked like a strange
woman in the room I shut the door and ran away.
Was what followed connected to this? Because Michael – I imagine it was him –
devised a game in which we sat side by side on a sofa-sized wicker chair on his
verandah, our backs to the windows, with the big dark-wood front door on our
left. And I sang. No words, nor any particular song. I just made it up, singing ‘La, la, la’. And after a time we heard someone, or some
thing, coming up the broad wooden flight of stairs outside. The door was closed but we could hear this
heavy, slow tread ascending the stairs.
And then there was silence, as whatever it was silently crossed the
tiled floor between the top of the stairs and the front door. There was a pause while I sang on. And then the door opened! The door opened and there was no one there! We shrieked and ran.
How is this to be explained? In view of other similar events that
manifested themselves over the years in rooms that I later learned were
supposed to be haunted -- not to mention further night terrors – I developed a
theory. But more about that later.
Other games had more of a sexual slant. But I knew nothing about such matters, and
only became involved through a child’s curiosity and a polite willingness to
please anyone older than me.
A tall and manly boy called Erskine Abbott,
who was about six years older than me, showed me and another small boy his
operational scar. Erskine lived in Mary Road and his
father was an assistant traffic manager at the docks at Keamari. It’s possible he was a descendant of the one
of the five sons of General Sir James Abbott who gave his name to
Abbottabad. We were behind a tree and
Erskine lowered his pants and, without showing his genitals, displayed a
diagonal scar low down on his stomach that ended at his groin. The scar was made lurid by what looked like
yellow paint. I know now that the
yellow was an iodine wash, used in those days, and that the operation may have
been done in connection with his appendix or an undescended testicle.
Erskine was also responsible, I think, for
a game at the Goodhands, whose three lively fair-haired children, two boys and
a girl, were having a party. The
younger children, including me, sat on the floor, while the older ones played
some game based on Forfeits, during which items of clothing were discarded,
though not everything, and a boy or girl paraded between the other children. It was puzzling and odd, but quite innocent
-- as far as I know.
Billy Maish once wanted to tell me how
babies were made, and another boy once wanted me to come and see two Indians
copulating somewhere. But I pretended
that I knew all about babies – my mother must have provided me with some
suitably euphemistic and implausible information – and wasn’t interested in
seeing any Indians making babies. I’d
seen cats and dogs copulating, but only wondered why they were attacking each
other in that rather curious way.
John Mahon, the older brother of skinny
little Jerry, with whom I sometimes played, had a desire (I now realise) to
play immodest games with me that were variations of Fathers and Mothers,
although I don’t recall that he actually touched me or that anything sexual
occurred. Nonetheless it was all very puzzling and odd.
A
group of four other teenage boys, on holiday from boarding-schools, had similar
designs. In one of their homes, I was
instructed to drop my shorts and pants and lie face-down on the edge of a
bed. This was also rather unusual and peculiar,
but I wasn’t going to dispute anything they said as they were bigger and older.
Either I looked too unattractive and
pathetic, or my trusting innocence and compliance defeated their aims. I was
told to pull my shorts up and go away.
Maybe one of the boys took pity on me.
But I never reacted, then and thereafter, as if I expected to be or played
the role of a victim. As some of these
older boys happened to be at boarding-schools in Kashmir or Bangalore, they would have been well aware
that certain pleasures might be enjoyed with younger boys. But never of course with your contemporaries
and friends. And not with me.
John Mahon had a bland but thuggish appearance. Aged 13 or so, he once egged on Johnny
Walker and me to fight each other, to wrestle and hit each other. He was killed in a car crash after the
war.
His father, Colonel Mahon, known as Harry
John, was Secretary of the Sind Club for five years, despite the fact that he
had an Anglo-Indian second wife, or mistress, who was probably Jerry’s mother,
possibly John’s. Her name was
Eileen. I remember her as being
overweight and sloppily dressed. Helen
Johnson told me that Mrs Mahon was an alcoholic, that she was treated for her
addiction, unsuccessfully, and when denied drink on her return from a hospital,
used to down turpentine and eau de cologne.
Colonel Mahon was himself a notorious drunk: his nose was purple and had
holes in it.
My sister’s friends were mostly girls of
her own age. She was six years older than me, so when I was
eight she would be 14. I was used to
seeing her with Alison Walker, Margaret Hutchison, Pepita Wishaw, Joy Rossiter,
Deirdre Clegg, Wendy Davis and the McKenzie sisters, with whom she had voyaged
to India
during the war. Diana Bond, the second
of the Bonds’ three girls, was friendly with them. I rather liked the older girls, though they
were noisy and screamed a lot, and I had a secret liking for a quieter girl
with long blonde hair called Jennifer Blackwell. But something happened to her – she
disappeared. She had some sort of
accident. On the other hand, her father,
who was a senior executive with Shell Oil, may have been posted to another part
of India. Alternatively, she might have gone to South Africa, as several families did, fleeing
thither when the Japanese advanced to the edge of India.
A thin and sunburnt, freckled boy, David
Thornton, was part of my sister’s group, as were the Herman brothers, teaming
up with the girls at weekends and during the school holidays. Some young officers also sought the company
of the girls, although, being 14 or 15, they were considered to be far too
young to have boy-friends, and liaisons with older men, even those aged 20 or
21, were not approved. As a safeguard,
a mother or some older woman always accompanied their teenage daughters to
parties. There were very few young
adults in Karachi. Most young men would have been in the
services, and their wives would have been with them or back in England. During the war the clubs were peopled by
married couples in their forties, teenagers and children. It was an unusual social mix of executives’
families and officers.
Marion and Alison Walker associated more
with the British officers than the American ones, although it was an American
who taught Marion
how to jive. Officers in a Scottish
regiment, the Black Watch, who played rugby on the maidan near Bath Island Road,
were favoured more than others. There
was Sandy Buchanan and Marshal Pugh, who was known as Puffer. He was from Dundee and a bit of a dreamer
according to Marion,
although she found his habit of quoting poetry quite romantic. Any romances only blossomed during the day,
as the girls had to be home when it got dark – they were not to be out cycling
at night. They were also not to wear
high heels, not until they were 15, and at parties they were chaperoned. Any romances
were inevitably nipped in the bud when officers were posted elsewhere.
When Marion
was 14, in August 1944, she joined the WVS (Women’s Voluntary Services), which
had been founded in June 1938. Proudly
wearing a green uniform, a beret and a badge, she was taken twice a week in an
ambulance to military hospitals to get ill and injured servicemen to take up
sewing as occupational therapy. She
carried a tray of coloured threads, needles and examples of what might be made
into the wards, and in one of them she was told not to react when confronted by
airmen whose faces had been burnt and were disfigured. She also took part in sewing-bees, winding
bandages and making pyjamas for the troops, and helped out at canteens for the
soldiers, called Tommies, who were excluded from the whites-only, officers-only
clubs. Apart from the canteens the
soldiers could only frequent Indian cafés where they might eat and drink.
Most of Marion’s socialising was done at the Gymkhana
and the Boat Club, where she played tennis and where she swam. Daytime outings at Sandspit or Hawkes Bay
were other occasions when parents, teenagers and children spent the most time
together, and during the war, military types (officers only) would be invited
to join in the fun.
There is a sunny photo of me, aged five or
six, sitting on a sandy beach with my father and a big, burly older man, Colonel
Jackson (Jacko). He was a colonel in
the Punjab Regiment. He was also one of
my mother’s boy-friends, possibly the first, though there must have been others
and brief affairs with an occasional married man. She had a lot of time on her hands. Other wives found things to do, like working
part-time for the Red Cross or in a hospital, or doing some charity work, or
serving at canteens, but none of that was for her, although she joined a sewing
group. A photo of my mother, taken
about 1940 or 1941, when she would have been 42 or 43, shows her in a white
swim-suit, full-bosomed and sitting seductively in a shallow sea wearing a white
bathing-cap.
She still dressed colourfully and
fashionably and wore bright red lipstick and a touch of rouge. I have visions of her renewing her lipstick,
peering into a round hand-mirror, and powdering her nose. She was said to look like Edwina, Countess
Mountbatten, and the American film-star, Jane Russell, though she was not as
voluptuous as Jane Russell, being much less curvy overall, with thin arms and
long slim legs.
Helen Johnson remembered that at wartime
sewing parties Louie was full of humour, ‘a wicked lady’, and that the other
wives missed her company when she stayed away.
Margaret Hankinson wrote, ‘I had a working party in the flat for the Red
Cross. Your mother joined us and kept
us amused. I nagged her into
knitting. She was always full of fun
and well known in the social world.’
Theoretically, when she absented herself from such activities as these,
and didn’t participate in canteen work or setting up tea-stations at the docks,
giving cakes and sweets to departing soldiers, it was to care for her
children. She may have been caring for
the military in other ways.
Jacko was succeeded by an American
air-force officer, Dod Shepherd, stationed at the American air-base at Muripur. He was about 28, tall, sun-tanned,
wavy-haired and boyish. Another
boy-friend was Harry Bradley, but he doesn’t appear in any photo and I don’t
recall anything about him. He or Dod
Shepherd may have been the man who, accompanied by my mother, woke me up one
night to show me where he had been wounded in a leg, in his thigh – another odd
thing I remember. The Americans could be rumbustious. One of their number, said Helen Johnson,
threw a tear-gas bomb onto the dance floor of the ballroom at the Gymkhana
during a New Year’s Eve dance. Another
once led a camel onto the floor.
After Dod Shepherd and Harry Bradley there
was an Australian, Arthur Macrae, a sergeant in the RAF in his thirties and a
bit of a rough diamond, sunburnt and tough-looking, with sleeked back dark hair
and a wide grin. Finally there was a youngish
Scot, Bob Finlayson, a jocular RAF corporal with a moustache. He
must have been in his late twenties, was tall and pallid and wore baggy
shorts. I imagine my mother’s
boy-friends dropped in when my father was at work and I and my sister were at
school and the servants had been dismissed for the day.
What seems amusing to me now is that my
mother’s boy-friends got younger as she got older. She was 47 in August 1945. Not only that – their ranks diminished along
with their ages, going from colonel to flight-lieutenant, from sergeant to
corporal. The lovers of Catherine the Great, Empress of
Russia, also got younger and of lesser rank as she aged.
I can’t think why I remember the names of
these men, but there are a few photos of me with all of them, except Harry
Bradley. Perhaps they were surrogates
for my father, who began fading from the scene, as far as I was concerned, as
the war progressed. He was now
spending a lot of his spare time at the clubs, drinking and smoking and playing
billiards. I think he was but briefly
with us at Naini Tal and not at all at Abbottabad. The only event I associate with him later in
the war was a murder trial, when he was on the jury. The accused was a man who had allegedly
pushed his wife off the Oyster Rocks.
Helen Johnson’s husband, Johnny, was also
on the jury. She told me that the
couple involved were Indian and newly married, and that the husband had insured
his wife’s life for a large sum of money.
They went by boat for a picnic on the Oyster Rocks on a windy day. The husband’s story was that a strong gust
had caught his wife’s sari and blown her off a cliff. Threads of the sari were later said to have
been found on his clothes. The woman’s
body was retrieved and shown to the jury.
It had been partly eaten by crabs.
The man was found guilty and hanged.
This was the first murder that came to my
notice and the drama of it intrigued and interested me, even then – as others
were to do much later on.
My father was now no longer as handsome as
he used to be, mainly because he wore thick-rimmed glasses all the time. They
dented the bridge of his nose, which was developing the swollen, veined and
discoloured hue of a heavy drinker. But he didn’t put on much weight. Whether
he had girl-friends, married or otherwise, I do not know. Somehow I doubt it. Margaret Hankinson wrote, ‘They built a
hotel at Drigh Road
– it became the custom for those wanting secret meetings with the wrong wives
to take them over there.’ But I don’t
think my father was one of these errant husbands.
By 1944 the Germans had been driven out of
North Africa and were being driven out of Italy. Everywhere the Allies were winning the war. And then, on D-Day, the sixth of June, the
Allied invasion of the northwest of France began. The following year Berlin was surrounded by the Russians in
April 1945 and they linked up with the Americans. Mussolini was shot by Italian partisans, and
on 30 April Hitler shot and killed himself.
World War Two officially ended on 8 May. The war in the Pacific against
the Japanese continued, however, until on 15 August Japan
surrendered.
Most of Marion’s
girl-friends had left Karachi
long before this, apart from Alison Walker and Joy Rossiter. Some feared a Japanese invasion of India. The Mackenzie sisters, as well as Margaret
Hutchison, David Thornton and the Herman brothers all left Karachi.
Deirdre Clegg went to America
and Pepita Wishaw to South Africa. American families returning to the USA had the longest of sea journeys, having to
voyage to Europe and across the Atlantic Ocean, or eastwards to the Far East and then across the Pacific.
Early in 1945 I was given an Autograph
book, made up of coloured pages on which family and friends inscribed not just
their names but paintings, drawings, and assorted verses. Most of the pages are blank. However, there is a coloured drawing of
Dolly Duck by Jane Maish and one by Billy Maish of Spitfires shooting down
German fighters, copied from a comic, Rockfist Rogan RAF. Appropriately, in later life he joined the
RAF and became an Air Commodore. My
mother (‘Mummy, 3/3/45’) did a pretty painting of an English cottage and
garden, with the loving, thoughtful message, ‘Live happy; tend thy flowers; be
tended by my blessing’ – a message much more meaningful to me these days. She and my sister were both neat and careful
painters. Marion’s contribution, dated 12 April, was a
comic cartoon. Three comic verses
called ‘Foolish Questions’ came from Erskine Abbott, to which he had added
‘written with a broken arm.’ This is a
surprising entry, dated 2 April, as I don’t recall that he was ever a friend,
although I would have liked him to be my older brother. One of my kindergarten teachers, Norah
Rogers, penned a useful adage on 10 April, as did her sister, Shelagh Carter,
the day before, as well as a cute Lucie Attwill type of painting. Other paintings and verses were contributed
by women whose names mean nothing to me now.
Later on, in Scotland, contributions would come
from my Aunt Ada, my Cousin Eileen and a few others, the last being dated 2
June 1953. In the centre of the book
is a painted Friendship Wall, with bricks signed by some of the above,
including Jerry Mahon (on 19 October 1945) and others by Bill Nicoll and JD
Lennie from my school in Edinburgh – again, I don’t recall that Lennie was a
friend.
According to Marion, our father had a nervous break-down
towards the end of the war. It was
caused, she said, by pressures of work.
He’d had no leave since 1938, and Marion
said that he returned to Scotland
and stayed with my Uncle Alastair and Aunt Jenny in Glasgow – and presumably visited his mother
and Billy Elder. Of this I remember
nothing, and my aunt makes no mention of this in her Memories. As it is, I have few visual memories of him
in the last years of the war. He seems to
have faded away from my life, until he reappeared later on in Edinburgh.
But the fact that he did return to
Scotland is confirmed by a detailed four-page article he wrote, possibly for a
newspaper or magazine, about his trip back to India, which is entitled ‘Notes
on the voyage from Liverpool to Bombay by HMT, MV Britannic, 8th to
29th September, 1945’. He
was now 47. He had left India on the
Queen of Bermuda in May.
He wrote, ‘On Saturday afternoon, 1st
September, I received a telegram from the India Office offering me a passage
from Liverpool to Bombay
about the 8th. I replied
accepting it. On Wednesday, 5th
Sept – the very date on which my 4 months leave at Home expired – I received a
long letter from the India Office telling me to whom I was to report, time and
date, etc. Although the war in Europe
and the Far East had terminated, the vessel by
which I was to sail was referred to as “Code A5E”. All baggage, therefore, had to be labelled
with this code number. On no account
was “destination” to be shown!’
Travelling overnight between Glasgow and Liverpool by
a crowded train was made difficult and vexatious by a shortage of porters, by
queues, by having to transport his two suitcases and a kitbag by taxi from Lime Street station
to the dock. He was travelling with a
man called Platt.
‘On Saturday, 8th Sept, about
1,000 passengers must have arrived from various parts of England and Scotland to embark on A5E, and what
a job they had getting their luggage to the Landing Stage. The STO (Sea Transport Officer) came in for
a lot of criticism, but of course he blamed the Owners of the ship for not
supplying transport, whereas they blamed him!
The Customs shed was packed with passengers and it was impossible to
move about in freedom. After Passports
had been examined we collected our luggage and were told that WE were to put it
on board ourselves! Porters were NOT
allowed on the ship. Those who had
heavy and large steel cabin trunks had some difficulty in enlisting the
services of other passengers to help them carry the trunks on board. For the most part of the day the staircase
and alley-ways were packed with passengers struggling with their luggage.
‘MV Britannic is owned by the Cunard White
Star Line, and is a very fine ship indeed.
But she was never built for service in the Red Sea and Indian
Ocean. She was not
air-conditioned, had no “blowers” and there was NOT a single fan in any of the
Public rooms. There were about 4,000
troops and 1,000 1st Class passengers on board when we sailed on
Sunday, 9th Sept. The number
of lifeboats aboard would have accommodated – so I was told – about 1,600
souls. Certainly not more than
2,000. Seating accommodation worked out
to about ONE seat for every 4 passengers!
The starboard deck, which was allotted to us, was packed all the time
and it was impossible to walk about without bumping into someone. The 1st Class Saloon accommodated
about 300 persons at the most.’
Crowded conditions, pointless orders,
rules and drills – passengers had to carry life-belts with them all the time,
even in the Suez Canal – were a feature of the
voyage. There were two sittings for
meals, breakfast being at 8.0 am, lunch at 12 noon, and dinner at 6.0 pm, and
there was no morning or afternoon tea.
No bread was served at any meal, although there was plenty of fresh
butter and sugar. Green vegetables were
served only once and oranges now and then.
Nothing alcoholic could be bought or drunk on board, and civilian
passengers were rationed to 150 Woodbine cigarettes, four bars of chocolate and
three packets of biscuits a week. Every
morning, at 10.15, there were boat drills lasting half an hour. Life-belts had to be worn and to start with
no one was allowed to talk or smoke during the drills.
The Britannic docked at Port Said for 36 hours. No one was allowed ashore – not even the
ship’s crew – and no trading with the bum-boats was allowed. An air letter that Gordon sent to Louie
arrived in Karachi
four days after he did. Two soldiers
were taken ashore on stretchers.
Another one died of heart failure and was buried at sea. The 120-mile journey down the Canal took 12
hours, during which the Britannic passed the wrecks of two small ships that had
been bombed and sunk by German aircraft during the war.
After a stop of two hours at Suez the ship entered the Red Sea,
where my father said it was ‘Just Hell!’
Nearly all the male passengers and troops discarded their shirts and
vests. ‘Bare backs and chests were
glistening with sweat,’ he wrote, ‘and as were unable to walk about or move
anywhere in freedom, the smell of hot flesh and dirty shorts almost became
unbearable at times!’ At 10.0 pm every
night the passengers were ordered off the open decks as these had been allotted
overnight to the troops, who presumably suffered more from the heat down below,
with no blowers and no portholes. My
father shared an L-shaped cabin, which had a porthole, with eight other
men. They slept in narrow three and two
tier bunks, closely stacked on top of each other. It was impossible to read in bed – my
father’s bunk was just off the floor, and it had no bed-light. Movement was impeded by the piled up luggage
of the eight men, who had to share a solitary wash-hand basin. ‘What a job it was in the morning trying to
shave!’ he wrote. ‘I used to get so mad
at the others bumping into me! For five
nights the temperature in the cabin was 98F minimum and 106F maximum … and it
was NOT a “dry” heat but an excessively DAMP one. Talk about sweat! … We took turns at sitting
under the one and only little fan … What a nightmare it all was. And there was no cool or iced water to
drink.’
After four nights of this ‘discomfort and
misery,’ Gordon’s right foot swelled and became painful, and the skin taut and
blue. He saw a doctor who diagnosed
arthritis, caused by the heat and the limited diet, and he was sent to the
passengers’ hospital, where lay three others similarly afflicted. There a medical orderly applied a lead and
opium poultice to his foot twice a day and gave him some pills to help him to
sleep. This lasted for five days, until
the ship reached Bombay where, unable to wear a
shoe, he wore a carpet slipper until he got to Karachi.
While in the hospital he complained about the ward he was in – it wasn’t
too clean and there was cigarette ash and fag-ends all over the floor. The wash-hand basin was also dirty and the
bath so dirty he refused to use it, hopping instead all the way back to the
bathroom by his cabin. He disliked
having to make his own bed and do his own washing, and complained about the
food he was being served. In the end he
told the orderly ‘to bring me a plate of soup, a milk pudding and a cup of
tea. Really, my patience was coming to
an end.’ He and Platt also had a row
with an executive officer, Major Ray – a ‘perfect twirp’ – about how the
civilian passengers were being treated.
‘Well after all,’ said Major Ray, ‘you have NO right to be on a
transport.’ Platt almost hit him.
The Britannic anchored off Bombay at noon on
Thursday, 27 September, docking the following day. However, no one was to be allowed ashore
until the morning of the Saturday.
‘This order,’ wrote my father, ‘was
modifed a little later after the Police came on board, and passengers who lived
in Bombay or
had a place to go to were permitted to land.
At 6.30 pm a shipping clerk from my Bombay Office arrived with a car and
a letter from Van Dusen who said that he would be pleased to put me up if I
could get off the ship that evening. I
never left a ship in such a hurry! … When I got to Van’s house I had a
delightful whisky and soda and a freshwater bath – the first for 18 days.’
He returned to the ship on the Saturday to
collect his luggage and pass through Customs.
His Head Office had managed to get an Air Priority flight for him, and
he left Bombay
on the Sunday morning. He was lucky --
travelling by train would have taken four days and four nights. The plane, a Dakota DC3, landed with its 26
passengers at Mauripur
Airport after a flight of
3½ hours. ‘Most enjoyable,’ he
wrote.
His account ends with some comments about
his weight. ‘When I left Glasgow I weighed 12
stone 5 lbs. When I weighed myself the
other day I was 11 stone 3 lbs – just a mere 1 stone and 2 lbs difference. No more voyages in Transports for me!’
The Britannic was in service throughout
the war as a troopship and carried some 180,000 troops, usually 5,000 at a
time. It had two low funnels and was
the third Cunard liner to bear the name.
After the war it was returned to Cunard, refitted and went back at work
as a luxury liner in 1948.
It’s rather pleasing to me to realise from
this account that my father was easily upset by irrational, unreasonable and
authoritarian behaviour – as I am. And
if this solitary example of his literary talents is anything to go by, does it
indicate that I may have inherited my talent for writing from him?
Meanwhile, in Karachi, everything had begun to change, as
the hedonistic life the British had led in the Raj neared its close. After the war against Germany ended, the Japanese, driven out of Burma and all the islands and territories they
had occupied, had surrendered unconditionally in August, 1945 after
atomic-bombs had exploded over the cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. One far-off day I would be involved in the
publication of a book by a Japanese doctor about the destruction of Nagasaki and the aftermath.
VJ
Day, Victory over Japan,
was celebrated on 15 August. I was nine
that September – on the day that my father arrived at Bombay on the Britannic. Already the ending of British rule in India was being
negotiated by the Indian leaders and Mountbatten, as well as the partition of
what had been the British Raj. The British, marooned in India by the
war, had made the most of the last years of the Raj and now it was time to go
home.
I have no recollection of any of these
events, and had no idea then or later on that the partition of British India
into India and Pakistan would
lead to the consequent wholesale movement and slaughter of millions. However, an echo of the troubles ahead
resounded in Karachi
in February 1946 when on a Monday morning the Royal Indian Navy bombarded the
town.
This was occasioned by a total strike and
subsequent mutiny by the Indian sailors of the RIN in Bombay, in protest at the general poor
conditions in the Indian navy and the even poorer food. The strike spread throughout India. The mutinous crew on an Indian destroyer,
the Hindustan, moored off Manora, were given an ultimatum by the British
authorities – surrender the ship or be fired on by a battery of Royal Artillery
4-inch guns that had been positioned on the opposing dockside. When the ultimatum expired the RA opened
fire, badly damaging the Hindustan and killing
some of her crew. In response, naval
ratings on the destroyer trained her guns on the docks and the town and fired
on both. But the shells the Indians
used weren’t primed and didn’t explode.
Some damage was caused but there were no casualties.
I remember the sound of distant guns, and
for a moment it seemed, though the war was over, that it was beginning all over
again.
It was time to go, and so, in April 1946,
my mother, Marion and I, having said our various goodbyes, left Bath Island Road by
car for the docks with all our luggage.
From there we embarked on a small coastal steamer that took us down to Bombay. It was overcrowded with Indian families
heading south, in anticipation of the partition of India. Most slept on the deck. Out at sea porpoises accompanied us and once
there were whales. My father stayed
behind in Karachi,
and moved into bachelor quarters in the Sind Club.
Because of my anaemia and recurring
illnesses and complaints, my mother had managed to get a certificate from a
doctor saying I should return to Britain sooner than later, and this got us
onto one of the first ships leaving India, HMT (His Majesty’s Troopship) Andes,
which had room for some civilians. The
Maishes would follow on the next trip the Andes made back to England.
My
mother, Marion and I spent two nights in a hotel in Bombay
and had dinner in the apartment of the Manager of the National Bank of India, whom my father had known in Karachi since 1921. Bill Harris was another Scot. His apartment extended over the entire top
floor of the Bank. In the centre was a
roof garden which, though lit up for us that night, was not as impressive as
the views of the city from the windows and a terrace. Sounds of distant rioting could be heard in
the city and they made my mother even more anxious to leave. But it all seemed very unreal and remote to
me, for my life in India
had already begun to fade from my mind. My future life – though faintly alarming as
everything about it was unknown – would soon be filled with everything that was
new. There was a long sea voyage before us and at
journey’s end a landing in a country which everyone referred to as Home. But for a long time Scotland, and England, never seemed like
Home. I was a child of the Raj, and
much of what I experienced thereafter was alien in every way. It was dismal, cold and grey in this dingy,
grimy place called Home. There was
rationing and austerity, and no servants to look after us and see to our needs.
I expect that my mother, aside from the
matter of my health, wanted Marion and me to have a proper Scottish education
in Edinburgh, and she would have hoped to return to Scotland the minute the
European war ended in 1945. We could
have flown back in one of the BOAC flying-boats that took three days to travel
from Karachi to London.
But that would have cost too much.
Before we left 4 Bath Island Road, the servants lined up
outside Variawa House to say their goodbyes.
They bowed and blessed us. We
shook their hands. I was taken aback
when our hamal seized my hand in both of his and softly wept. Silent tears ran down his face. He would have been aware of the imminent,
destructive end of the old order and that he would never see his chota sahib
again.
I of course, aged nine, was blissfully
unaware that I was leaving my sublimely untrammelled childhood, happy and free,
in the heat and dust of Karachi. Excited to be leaving, I had no notion that
I was heading for a grey and rainy northern country, to the drabness and
rationing of post-war Scotland,
where the cold east wind of Edinburgh
would freeze my skinny body and blight my trustful nature, as would school
regimes and organised games.
My wide-eyed innocence, which had survived
untarnished in India, would
slowly corrode in Scotland. I
would also be swapping the medical rigours of the Raj for recurring rounds of
persistent colds, coughs, chilblains, hay fever and flu. And I would no longer be able to greet with
non-judgemental curiosity the ever-exciting novelties of each brand new Indian
day.
4. EDINBURGH, 1946-50
The
Andes was a newish ship, having been launched in Belfast just before the war. She was painted white and had a wide yellow
funnel. Marion
thought she was enormous. Although only
supposed to carry 600 passengers, she may have had as many as 2,000 on this
voyage, most of them troops.
On boarding, I was separated from my
mother and Marion and lodged in a sort of dormitory with other boys and young
males. When my mother found out that I
was eating nothing but ice-cream and soup – I ate at a different mess from hers
-- she made a fuss and removed me from the dormitory and into her cabin, which
was already packed with nine other women and girls, including Marion.
According to Marion,
I slept from then on in my mother’s bunk, head to tail. I don’t remember that. But it can’t have been comfortable for
either of us and may have been responsible for my later reluctance to share my
bed with anyone.
The cabin we were in had a port-hole and
was on the second deck. There were
three sittings for meals. We were on
the first sitting, and when we emerged from our sitting we would tell those who
were queueing outside, awaiting their turn, what was on the menu that day – and
what not to have.
I had travelled this way before, when I
was a baby. But this time I was on my
feet at the railings of the Andes when the ship approached the entrance to the
Suez Canal after sailing up the hot and strangely blue Red
Sea. The hazy coast of Egypt was on our left. I would go ashore there in November 1985,
when the Sea Princess, a P & O cruise ship I was on, moored at Safaga, and
then be driven the 140 miles overland, with others from the ship, to see the
ancient ruined splendours of Luxor, the Tombs of the Nobles, the Valley of the
Queens and the Valley of the Kings. It
was all very rushed, with little time to look, and less to think about what
these places and the people had been like thousands of years ago.
The Andes anchored off the town of Suez before proceeding at a stately pace up the length of
the Canal, in single file with other ships, through the Great and Little Bitter
Lakes to Port Said.
On the starboard side of the Andes
were the Biblical barren wastes of the Sinai.
Approaching Port Said
a train-track and a road ran alongside the canal on our left. Camels and donkeys sauntered along the road,
and the occasional rude Egyptian raised the skirts of what he wore, bent and
showed us his bum. I ran from side to
side of the ship as she slowly moved up the Canal, having to push through the
troops who crowded the railings, and finally squeezed myself at the front of an
exterior deck overlooking the bow. I
was gone so long that my mother, by then distraught and in tears, had a
tannoyed broadcast made – ‘Mrs Honeycombe has lost her little boy’ – asking anyone who found me to take me to the
Purser’s Office. It was Marion, none
too pleased, who found me, and she upbraided our mother for being so stupid as to
think, with hundreds of troops at the railings, that no one would notice if I happened
to fall overboard.
We didn’t go ashore at Port Said, and so I
never saw Simon Arzt, a famous colonnaded emporium, where in previous years my
mother and father must have acquired fginely carved ornaments and pieces of
furniture, like alabaster ash-trays, leather poufs, replicas of Egyptian
statues and animals, and ornate side-tables and lamps made of brass, wood,
ebony and ivory – all of which had decorated British homes for many years. But there was much to look at from the
ship’s upper decks, peering down at the town and the bum-boats that came
alongside and besought us to buy some item from the variety of souvenirs they
carried. Vociferous, eager boatmen
threw a doubled system of ropes up to a port-hole or a deck, and a buyer,
having chosen from above what he wanted and debated the price, put his money in
a bag, and as the money was pulled down, the item came up to the trusting
customer. Gulli-gulli men were allowed
on board to entertain the children, magically producing a coin or an egg or a
little yellow chick from our ears.
In 1985, I was on a lecture cruise on the
Sea Princess, and when she inched her way at sunset from the quay at Port Said and glided out
of the Canal, something magical happened.
I was standing, on my own, in the centre of the walkway below the bridge
when suddenly the opening chords of the Overture to Lawrence of Arabia rang
out, the music soaring with the main and most romantic theme of that most
excellent movie as the great ship moved slowly towards the sunset and the open
sea. It was heart-stirring, and I revere the ship’s
officer who chose that music to be played as the liner left Port Said.
Another piece of music played back in 1946
meant more to my mother than to me.
Every morning on the Andes the same
piano music was played to announce the start of the new day. It was Sinding’s Rustle of Spring. My mother told me that her mother used to
play the Rustle of Spring in their Henderson
Street home in Bridge of Allan. It must have seemed to her that she was
being welcomed back to her Scottish homeland.
My sister tried to play the piece later on, but it was too quick and
complicated for her – and quite impossible for me when I tried.
After Port Said
there were no more stops, and although a pale smudge of the coast of northern
Africa was glimpsed, I have no recollection of Gibraltar. We must have passed by at night. In the Bay of Biscay
we were given our chocolate ration, all of which was avidly consumed. As it was quite stormy in the Bay, not a few
on board were rather sick.
On a sunny day in April 1946, or early in
May, the Andes inched her way up the Solent to Southampton
and edged her bulk along her dock-side berth.
Amid much hustle and bustle we disembarked and found our way onto a
train.
I had been born and lived in India, and now
surveyed what I had been led to believe was Home. Although the sun shone and everything was
very green, what I saw bore little resemblance to the charming and delightful
pictures of the English countryside in the books I’d read. Seen from the train taking us from
Southampton to Waterloo,
everything seemed cramped and dowdy.
Small grey houses were squashed together in rows; fields seemed no
bigger than handkerchiefs and were dotted with cows and sheep that looked like
toys. There were white puffs of clouds
like smoke in the sky. There were no vast vistas, as in India, no
mountains or forests, no mile-wide rivers.
The overall impression was that everything had been compressed and
reduced to a toy-town size and had suffered from years of neglect. Bomb-ruined buildings and damage in London added to the
general picture of decay. Home didn’t
look at all attractive or appealing.
My home of course was in India. I had known nowhere else. It was not until I bought my first home in
1965 that I had a home I could call my own.
Up to then I had always lived in hotels or rented accommodation, as my
parents had done since their marriage and continued to do so until they
died. They never owned a house, a
family home. There was nowhere I could
really call home, where I belonged – except 4 Bath Island Road. And in August 1982, when I flew to Karachi for a three-day visit, 36 years after I had left,
somewhere over Europe I realised that I was
really going home. I was seized with the emotion of a returning
prodigal son and tears came to my eyes.
Home to begin with in Edinburgh was the Leamington Hotel, a small
hotel at the higher end of Leamington Terrace.
The three of us shared an attic-like room on the top floor at the back,
our three single beds in a cramped row along one wall. There can’t have been much room for our
clothes and luggage and there was no wash-stand. We ate in a dining-room on the ground floor
at the front and having arrived from exotic India must have excited the
curiosity of the other guests, one of whom was a loud and large horsy lady
called Miss Hudson. Marion ate a lot and put on weight. She
developed a cold and sinus trouble. My
mother enjoyed herself by entertaining the other guests with saucy tales about
the Raj and being entertained by the gossip and intrigues of the inmates within
the hotel.
At the top of Leamington Terrace were the
open grassy spaces of Bruntsfield Links and the Meadows. My mother must have liked the area, as this
was where Marion
had been filmed with her mother and Aunt Jenny in 1934. It was also where her grandfather, James
Fraser Junior had lived, and died, in the 1880s and 90s.
I remember being dragged about, most
unwillingly, by my mother when she went shopping in Bruntsfield Place, along which trams
rattled and banged in both directions in the centre of the road, on their way
south to Morningside or north to Tollcross and Princes Street. Trams were double-deckers, connected to
overhead wires by a long arm which had to be swung around and reversed at a
tram terminus. Seats were also
reversible, and as trams could be driven from either end, the driver went and
sat at what had been the rear and was now the front. Tram destinations displayed at the front had
to be changed by the conductor unwinding a boxed roll.
The Edinburgh
trams were flat-topped and painted a dark maroon with white bands. Later makes of trams were more rounded and
less noisy. The conductor was always on
the move, collecting money and issuing tickets from a machine at his hip. As the trams had no doors, you could always
leap off or jump on when the tram was moving, although this was frowned
on. Trams were fun. Despite the fact that they had to rattle
down some fairly steep roads – Edinburgh
was built on hills – I don’t recall that any ever went out of control and
crashed. They must have had very strong
brakes.
On both sides of Bruntsfield Place were those tall,
four-storey tenement buildings so typical of Scottish cities. Once their granite blocks had been
clean-looking and pinky grey and pale.
Now they were darkly discoloured and almost black with years of smoky
soot from millions of chimneys adhering to damp, wet walls. Not for nothing was the city called Auld
Reekie. On the ground floor of one of
these buildings I made the ever-painful and dreaded acquaintance of a dentist,
Mr Maclean.
My mother must have liked him as he
remained as our dentist even after we had moved house (as it were) several
times. My teeth, ruined by excesses of
eating sweets, were in need of repair and I suffered the first of many visits
to dentists over the years. In 1946 the
drills were jarring lumps of steel and the needles much thicker than now. But Mr Maclean didn’t believe in injections
and although I wriggled and squeaked he only paused to adjust the angle of the
drill.
My poor teeth were part of my genetic
inheritance from the Frasers. My father
not only had all his hair when he died, he had all his teeth. My mother had dentures, as had my mother’s
oldest and unmarried sister, Aunt Ada, a severely handsome, grey-haired woman,
whose dentures were rather loose. She
appeared on the scene at this time. My
other aunt and my Fraser uncles had still to be met. In winter-time Aunt Ada also had a
semi-permanent drip at the end of her nose – something that bothers me now.
We didn’t stay long at the Leamington
Hotel. Marion,
now aged 15, was sent to continue her education at St Margaret’s School, and a
temporary school was found for me until I entered the Edinburgh Academy
in September. I was not of course
consulted about this, nor about any future aspects of my education. My mother’s eldest brother, Lovat, had gone
to the Academy and that’s where I had to go too. He was there in his middle teens for two
years, from 1907 to 1909, in Class IVb then IVa. There were other schools in the city, but the
Edinburgh Academy was the best public school from my
mother’s point of view. George
Watson’s, where my father and his sister had briefly been schooled, was never
considered. Nor was Heriot’s, nor the
Royal High.
I
must have been taken to the Academy to be inspected and to do some simple
tests. But the fact that I had a heroic
uncle, who’d been killed in the Great War and trained as an architect after
leaving the Academy, may have eased my acceptance there. I would have met Miss Smith, the head
teacher of the Preparatory School, to which I was assigned, and she it was who
probably suggested that I should become acclimatised to the basics of a
Scottish education by being sent, for the summer term, to a primary
school.
Before
long we left the Leamington Hotel, and one morning I found myself, equipped
with a satchel, pencils, a rubber and whatever else might be needed at this rather
basic school, on a tram trundling southwards from Craigmillar Park Road and up
a long slope to the Liberton terminus.
My schooling, and Marion’s,
had initiated the move from Leamington Terrace to a small hotel in Craigmillar Park Road,
which was further down the road from our former lodging at the Donisla Hotel
nine years ago. The siting of this
hotel enabled Marion
to walk to St Margaret’s School and me to get a tram to Liberton from a stop
across the road. I think that once
again we were all in the same bedroom and that I now had a pet mouse in a tiny
cage with an exercise wheel.
Liberton derived its name from the area’s
use, centuries ago, as a leper colony, or Leper Toun. The school was a short walk away from the
tram terminus along Gilmerton Road. What I learned I don’t remember. The schoolchildren there, both boys and
girls, seemed strange to me with their Scottish accents, their thick working-class
clothes and solemn attention in classes.
I must have seemed even stranger to them – I was from India, but
wasn’t brown or black. And I didn’t speak like them. There
was a distance between us and I didn’t make any friends. For the first time I became acquainted with
grammar and arithmetic.
The term passed and culminated in a Sports
Day on some parkland opposite the school.
I participated, without winning anything, in some peculiar (to me)
ritualistic games, like a three-legged race and an egg and spoon race.
It was a relief to leave school at the end
of the day and get back to the hotel.
But escaping from the hotel and roaming about, as I’d done in Karachi, wasn’t
sanctioned, although I remember taking an interest in people’s gardens near the
hotel and in holly-bush hedges, where birds’ nests might be found. Birdsongs were the only songs I heard at
this time, apart from those on the radio.
I’d heard nothing like the songs the Scottish birds sang. The cascading melodies of blackbirds and
thrushes made me listen, and hearing and seeing robins and blue tits, just as
Beatrix Potter had painted them, was a special delight.
Less of a pleasure was my mother’s insistence
in taking me on outings to Blackford Hill, where there was a pond and some
ducks. Marion
went with us. I was a very reluctant participant in such
outings, as I didn’t want to do what I was told I should or ought to do, and
walking tired me. I was still thin and
anaemic and strongly opposed to any lengthy physical activity. But resistance was useless. At that time, in a contest of wills, my
mother always won. With her Bridge of Allan village background, she was a
walker and a believer in fresh air. And
so we walked a mile or so there and a mile or so back, passing the dark,
forbidding bulk of the Hydropathic Establishment, which in WW1 had been the Craiglockhart War Hospital
where the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen had met while recovering
from the traumas of that war.
The only thing for me to do when we got to
Blackford Hill was to chase the ducks and climb to the top of the hill, from
where there was a fine view of the Pentland Hills, of the city, of the Castle,
of Salisbury Crags, of the volcanic excrescence of Arthur’s Seat, and of the
distant Firth of Forth and the sea.
At weekends and during the summer my
mother dragged me with her, sometimes literally, when she went shopping, and at
some point during that summer she took me with her to London.
She had previously only passed
through London, travelling on her way from a South Coast
port to Scotland
and vice versa. I expect that the
trip, a crazy idea, perhaps not hers, was intended to be educational where I
was concerned and a pleasure-living escape from domestic drudgery for her.
For
we had a companion -- Bob Finlayson, the RAF corporal in Karachi
and my mother’s final boy-friend, who had returned to Glasgow after the war. Marion
didn’t come with us. She probably
refused to go on the trip and instead stayed with some girl-friend. I also refused to go unless my mouse, Molly,
who had just given birth to six pink blind mice, came too. And she did, confined to a small box cage
for the week-long trip. We travelled in the cramped and odorous
discomfort of a coach. It was a very long
and dreary journey – much worse for Molly and her babies lodged in their cage
under my seat -- with an overnight stop in a small, dark and dingy hotel in Newcastle. When we got to London
I was most reluctantly taken hither and thither, by noisy bus and even noisier
Tube trains when not trudging through the dismal, crowded streets, to the Tower of London, to Westminster Abbey and other
touristy places, in which I had little or no interest. We stayed in a shabby hotel off Russell Square,
opposite a bomb-site. I presumed, if I presumed at all, that Bob
Finlayson had a separate bedroom like me.
London was a dark and
dirty city with gaps in its buildings like missing teeth. It was
ugly and grey, and it probably rained. I disliked everything about it and resented
the daily presence of my mother’s companion.
His moustache and Scottish accent annoyed me, as did his attempts at
humour. I behaved badly, didn’t speak at meals, and
was so provoked in the hotel one day by something that I hit my mother on the
chest. Somehow we all survived the
week, including Molly and her brood.
Back in Edinburgh she and they were then housed in a
larger cage, and when the babies were old enough they were sold for a few
pennies back at the store whence Molly came.
What happened to her after that I don’t remember. She disappeared, like the mouse who must
have been her spouse, like the other pets I had. I imagine my mother said they had died,
escaped or run away. It was she who fed
them and cleaned the cages. I just
played with them.
As I’ve said, Bob Finlayson lived in Glasgow, and I think it was during that summer that we
went to Glasgow
for the weekend. Marion was with us and she stayed with Uncle
Kenneth and Auntie Biddy, and my mother and I with Uncle Alastair and Auntie
Jenny. The two men were brothers of my
mother. The idea was for Marion and I
to meet our relatives and our cousins, and for them to meet us. My mother most probably contrived to meet up
with Bob Finlayson for a couple of hours.
Kenneth was the only one of her
brothers to have what she would have deemed to be a respectable occupation --
he was an architect. He and Biddy had a
son called John, and when the only son of Alastair and Jenny died, John Fraser
became the only surviving son of Dr Fraser’s six boys. Lovat, the eldest, had been killed in WW1. His younger brothers, Ian, Archie and Harry,
had no children and led disadvantaged or disreputable lives. Harry, the youngest, was an alcoholic,
Archie was lame, and Ian was somehow sinister.
Although he and his wife lived in Edinburgh
I was never taken to meet them. I
suspect that the problem with him was a sexual one, even that something of that
sort had happened in Bridge
of Allan.
Alastair and Jenny’s son was called
Gordon. They lived in a ground-floor
flat in a working-class area, Cardonald.
It was a bleak, treeless environment and made more desolate by derelict
air-raid shelters. Alastair and Jenny,
however, were both cheery, amiable people.
In their cluttered home we played card-games at night, like Canasta and
Beggar my Neighbour and Whist, and the grown-ups laughed a lot. Gordon was a weedy, fair-haired youth with a
soft whiny voice. I remember him once
wailing in a Glasgow
accent, ‘But I like ma porridge.’ He
had asthma. He was about the same age
as my sister, and she was 16 in August 1946.
Uncle Alastair had an amusing grey parrot which talked, whistled and
danced. He had bought it during his
years in the Merchant Navy and it was kept in the living-room in a large barred
cage. Whether the parrot’s feathers and
the cage caused Gordon’s asthma I do not know.
But indirectly or directly it caused his death. A year later Gordon Fraser had an asthmatic
attack and died.
I was ten on 27 September and on Wednesday
2 October 1946 my mother took me to the Edinburgh Academy
in Henderson Row and left me with Miss Smith who, apart from being Senior
Mistress of the Prep, taught Va, which was the top class in the Prep. Miss Smith was severe-looking, tall and
thin, with thin grey hair and staring pale blue eyes. She was in fact quite kindly.
Class Va was situated on the first floor of a building at the
rear of the Upper
School, above the
school’s dining-hall and kitchens.
Other classes, like Vb and Vc, IVa, b and c, were adjacent. The Prep’s teachers were all female. The lower classes of the Junior Prep were
lodged at the newly established Denham Green House, half a mile from New Field,
where were the playing fields of the Academy and the three boarding-houses that
accommodated boys whose parents were overseas or somewhere other than in the
city. That year there were 780 boys in
the Prep and Upper
School.
At the mid-morning break there would be a
stampede for the tuck-shop at the foot of our stairs, for iced buns with pink
and yellow tops and jam within them, and half pints of bottled milk, and at the
lunch break there was a rush to get seats at the far end of the dining-hall
where the Prep boys ate. In the
gravelled school yard outside the Prep ball games were played. Those involving a bat I avoided, including a
game peculiar to the school, in which a rubber ball was batted from end to end
of a chosen area in the gravelled Yards.
The bat was a wooden stick like a flattened spoon, a clacken. The game was called Hailes.
I don’t recall having to play rugby that
winter or cricket in the summer. I had
never played either, and no one ever explained the rules to me. My dread of games days and their wintry
torment awaited me in the Upper
School.
My first day at the Academy was only
memorable in that I turned up wearing long trousers. No one else did. This made me conspicuous, which I didn’t
want to be. The following day I wore
shorts, and continued to do so, like all the other boys, for three years. Most boys’ clothes were dark blue or grey,
shirts were white and school ties were worn, along with plain short-sleeved
jerseys. Sturdy shoes and stockings
held up by elastic bands completed our rig.
Mackintoshes (macs) and overcoats (coats) were worn on rainy days and in
the winter. Some boys, like myself,
also wore scarves when it was cold. And
of course we all had satchels, which were worn on our backs. They contained basic school equipment, like a
geometry set, a ruler, pencils and a rubber, as well as kit for PT and for
playing sports, including our boots. A fountain pen, a handkerchief and some money
were stuffed in our jackets. School
blazers, dark blue with a badge on the pocket were not obligatory, but a school
cap was, especially outside the school.
Dark blue, and trimmed with silvered thread, the cap bore the badge of a
silver laurel wreath surrounding a silver EA.
The Edinburgh Academy
had been established in the 1820s by a group of Scottish Tories and city
worthies including Sir Walter Scott, who all felt that the city needed a school
that would promote classical learning and teach not just Latin but Greek. The school song, Floreat Academia, was in
Latin, but above the six Doric columns that fronted the main building was a
Greek saying, which, translated, said, ‘Education is the mother of both wisdom
and virtue.’ Inscribed on the organ
within the main hall was a Greek motto.
Translated it said, ‘Always excel.’
The Academy, purpose-built on the northern fringe of the New Town,
opened for business in October 1824, and Sir Walter Scott himself addressed the
assembled dignitaries, masters, and the first intake of 372 boys. Other buildings were added much later – the
school library in 1900, the Prep and dining-hall in 1912, and the Gym after the
Great War, when it was also dedicated as a war memorial, inscribed with the
names of those boys who had died in WW1 and later on those who died in WW2. Below the Gym was a long room with benches
where we were taught woodwork and made simple artefacts. Despite the fact that my Honeycombe
ancestors had been carpenters and sawyers, I wasn’t very good at measuring
things and at using a carpenter’s tools.
Some famous writers were taught, though
briefly, at the Academy, like RM Ballantyne and Robert Louis Stevenson. Another pupil, Dr Joseph Bell, is now
recognised as the model for Conan Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes. Most former pupils had careers in the law,
the church, the military, accountancy and in various business enterprises,
often abroad.
I began well at the Academy. At the end of my first term, in December
1946, I was surprisingly graded 1 overall, out of a class of 25 boys. My
Punctuality and Conduct were ‘VG’. Miss
Smith, who wrote my school report, said, ‘He is a very capable, conscientious
worker, and in his general attitude to school life has already proved to be an
asset to the class,’ to which the Rector (or Headmaster), CME Seaman appended,
‘A splendid start.’
I was graded 1 in English and Writing. Miss Smith said, ‘Spelling and Dictation
very good. He has had some difficulty
with Grammar as much of it is new to him, but he is daily making excellent
progress. Composition and English
exercises very well done. He has an
appreciation of Poetry and Literature.’
Of my Writing she said, ‘Very good.
His books are very well-kept and he has learnt a new style of writing
rapidly.’ Of my Drawing she said, ‘He has
marked ability, and draws very well.’
Miss Hagart took us for History.
She wrote, ‘He has done some very satisfactory work in History.’ In the next report she said, ‘In History he
has supplied some admirable illustrations for the class chart.’ In Arithmetic I was graded 1 (for the first
and last time). Miss Smith said, ‘He has a clear grasp of
rules and works quickly with a good degree of accuracy.’ Of my Latin, where I was graded 2, she said,
‘He is succeeding in mastering his difficulties (chiefly with “case”) and is
making good progress.’
At the end of the Second or Spring Term,
in March 1947 the Rector wrote, ‘I like all I hear of his modest and
responsible attitude. He should do very
well.’ Miss Smith wrote, ‘He has worked
as before, with keen and thoughtful interest & can always be trusted to
maintain a high standard of work.’ At
the end of the Summer Term, when my grades in both Latin and Arithmetic had
dropped to 2, Miss Smith wrote, ‘His very keen intelligence and conscientious
work, with practical ability and imaginative powers equally well-developed,
promise very well for the future.’
‘Excellent,’ wrote the Rector.
My mother must have been well
pleased. She kept all my school
reports. I never saw them until they came
to me after her death. The comments that
the masters made were usually quite brief, until my last three years, when they
expressed themselves more fully. In
general, considering the amount of
reports they had to write three times a year, they applied some thought to what
they wrote, the Rector most of all. It
amazes me now to think that three times a year the Rector had to write
something apposite and useful about every boy in the school.
The Rector, Mr CME Seaman, had only been
Rector of the Academy for a year.
Educated at Christ’s Hospital in England,
he gained Firsts in Classical Mods and Greats at Oxford,
where he was at St John’s College, and had taught at Bedford
School and Rugby. He was 37 when he came to the Academy, a
short, stocky man with bright eyes, a small smile and a neat aquiline
nose. He was known to his family and
friends as George.
At the start of 1947, while still in the
Prep, I began having piano lessons once a week.
The lessons lasted until March
1952. Initially I was taught by Mrs
Howells. But in the Upper School Mr
Howells, the school’s organist and choir-master, took over. He was a thin, balding, bony, choleric man,
and he was once so enraged by the errors I made, and possibly my attitude, that
he boxed my ears, which is to say that he struck the left side of my head with
his clenched and bony fist. I went
scarlet with rage at this assault on my person, and as a result I eventually
abandoned the lessons -- also because I didn’t want to do the exams. I had learned enough to play the piano
moderately well, although I could never cope with anything requiring nimble
fingers and marked Allegro, and I never learned anything but the simplest
pieces by ear. As my family didn’t acquire a piano until the
1950s, I had to practice, unwillingly, on upright pianos at school.
In his thrice yearly reports Mr Howells
deplored my ‘lack of regular practice’ while adding that I was ‘a very valuable
member of the school choir.’ He said I
had ‘the necessary ability to make a very good player’ but would only become
one ‘by more regular and conscientious preparation for his lessons.’ I was ‘a genuinely musical boy,’ he said,
and had an ‘ability far above the average.’
In 1951 ‘considerable progress’ had been made, and Mr Howells even wrote
that I ‘should be able to take a leading place among school pianists of the
future.’ But then my keenness and
concentration waned and after the Easter Term my piano lessons ended. For two terms in 1954 I went back to Mr Howells
to study Theory – harmony, counterpoint and composition. But that was only because I was writing a
musical and needed to know how to put into written notes the songs that were in
my head.
Of the other boys in Class Va in
my first year at the Academy I recall very little, except that as we were
arranged alphabetically at the desks in our classroom, a pleasing juxtaposition
of surnames resulted – Heavens, Honeycombe and Kindness.
One boy I remember because I had to kiss
him – or rather pretend to kiss him.
This was JD Caute, a pretty, lively auburn-haired boy, known at school
as John and to an admiring public later on as the novelist David Caute,
pronounced Coat. For some suspect reasons we were cast by
female teachers as the leads in a little entertainment performed in the main
hall by boys from the Prep. It was
called The Princess and the Swineherd – Caute was the Princess, and I, very
aptly in view of my secret liking for Pigling Bland and his kind, as the
Swineherd. The piece was directed by a Prep mistress,
Miss McKellar, and it was, I have to say, a very odd choice, as at the
conclusion of the play, the Princess’s maidens, all young boys in long frocks
and wimples, made a circle around me and the Princess and cheered us on as I pretended
to kiss the air on either side of the Princess’s head 20 times – at the end of
which I turned into a Prince.
I don’t think either of us was damaged by
the experience, or put off from performing on stage – the first time that I did
so – for we were paired together again the following year, this time as
men. However, my fascination with red
hair and freckles might date from this time.
At the end of the summer term I was
announced to be, not top of the class, but second, and as a prize I was given a
lavishly illustrated book, called Birds, Trees & Flowers, for being Second
in Class – I still have it. HG (Harry)
Usher was top of Va. He went on to be Dux of the whole school in
1955.
Academically
it was all downhill for me from then on.
It was a gradual process, but never again did I get such glowing school
reports.
Meanwhile, we had moved yet again. The move was probably made towards the end
of 1946. This time a self-contained
flat was rented on the top or third floor of a house at 34 Murrayfield Avenue, and this time my
mother, sister and myself had small but separate bedrooms. Mine
overlooked the Avenue and the steps leading up to a pocket garden and the front
door. In addition we had a living-room that included
a dinner-table wedged into a corner, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchen lit by a
sky-light. I realise now that my
mother, who had been attended by servants in Bridge
of Allan and in Karachi, had at the age of 48 not only to
cook three breakfasts and three evening meals every day, but also to wash up,
clean and dust, and do any sewing, mending and ironing as well as the
laundry. All this she did from now on
without any help from me and perhaps a little help from my sister. She
never complained. She even cleaned my shoes.
The owner of the property, who lived on
the first two floors, was Mrs Bucher. I
believe she was the divorced wife of General Sir Roy Bucher, who had attended
the Academy from 1905 to 1913. He
served with the Cameronians in France
in WW1 and was in Iraq and India in
WW2. In 1948 he became the last
Commander in Chief of the British Indian Army.
Our connections with both India and the Academy must have
recommended us to Mrs Bucher. Her
presence was an evanescent one to me and we had little to do with her. She had three scruffy small dogs of
indeterminate breed, which crapped in the front garden. This practice and the fact that they slept
on her bed at night – I saw this for myself when her bedroom door was open as I
went upstairs -- didn’t endear them, or her, to me.
The cage containing my mouse, or mice, was
kept in the kitchen, which didn’t endear them, or me, to my sister. She was 17 in August 1947 and I was 11 the
following month. She quite rightly used
to comment on how spoilt I was. I
regret to say that my mother used to soap me in my bath, using a sponge or
facecloth, until I was pubescent, when I became self-conscious about my
body. My assisted bath-times ended when
the sponge that I employed to cover my embarrassment kept on floating away. Up to then I had presumed, as a child does,
that what happened in my home happened in every home, and that parents
generally behaved in the same parental way.
Now the bathing didn’t seem quite proper or right.
During the summer of 1947 the three of us
journeyed by train and boat to Northern Ireland,
to Belfast,
where lived my mother’s other older sister, Madge. She had married an engineer, Dundas Duncan,
a fierce-looking, controlling and matter-of-fact man, and they’d had a daughter
and a son, Eileen and Alistair, who was a year younger than Marion – Eileen was older. Madge, three years older than Louie, had a
soft, babyish voice and giggled a lot.
They lived in a house, a real home, in Stormont, not far from the
impressive Parliament building up on a hill.
They also had a car and a style of life of which I approved. Out for a drive we would stop somewhere and
pick the blackberries that grew in profusion along some country roads. We must have been there in September. Raspberries and rhubarb also seemed to be
plentiful. Although Dundas Duncan was a
bit scary, and Alistair a bit uptight, Eileen was fun and laughed in a barking,
mannish sort of way. Much later I
learned that she had a special female friend called Amy. It was the best holiday I’d had since
leaving India.
A curious incident occurred in the house
of a neighbour called Godfrey. I’d gone
there to borrow some book, and was scanning his bookshelves when I became aware
that he was standing very close behind me – so close that he rubbed against
me. I moved away as his proximity was
unwelcome and as whatever he was doing was odd – to be added to the list of odd
events that at the time were meaningless.
However, I didn’t borrow a book and have viewed with suspicion anyone
called Godfrey ever since.
Another holiday I had while we were living
in Murrayfield Avenue
was when I went by coach down to Hawick to stay with the Maish family, when I
met up again with Jane and Billy Maish.
After leaving India on
the Andes at the end of May 1946 (after us), they
had gone to Hawick to stay with Nancy Maish’s mother, Mrs Bolton. I shared a bed with Billy – something I had
never done before, except with my mother on the Andes. Billy must have been about 13. As I liked him, I didn’t mind his close
proximity nor his warm embrace. I stayed with the Maish family later on in England, but this
time I had a bed to myself. As it was,
I was never easy about sharing my bed with anyone. I was too aware of the breathing person
beside me and tended to become annoyed when woken up if bumped by an elbow or
foot.
My mother kept in touch with other
families who had left India,
with married couples about her age, and my sister corresponded with Alison
Walker, with the Mackenzie girls, with Margaret Hutchison and others. But none of the children I had known in Karachi did I ever see
again, apart from Johnny Walker and Jane and Billy Maish. My life in India
had been overtaken and overprinted by all the new experiences and people of my
schooling and life in Scotland.
At the start of my first year in the Upper School
and the start of the Winter Term, which lasted from the end of September to
just before Christmas 1947, I bypassed Classes 1a and 1b and was put in Lower II.
Divisions were now assigned to us.
There were four Divisions in the school, corresponding to competing
Houses in boarding-schools. I was in Carmichael. Then
there was Cockburn, Kinross and Houses – which was made up from the boys, known
as house-boys, who lived in the three boarding–houses at New Field. These houses were called Dundas,
Jeffrey and Scott and from the top floors had panoramic views of the Edinburgh skyline. We still wore shorts and continued to do so
until we reached Class IV. I was now
aged 11.
Lower II
was ruled by Mr Hempson, a cheerful, angular, jaunty man who used to throw
pieces of chalk or blackboard rubbers at us if we were not paying attention or
whispering. We sat at single desks, which had ink-wells –
the Academy used blue-black Quink ink – and were seated alphabetically, with A
and B at the front and W and Y at the rear.
Mr Hempson took us for Geography, Scripture and Mathematics. Other masters in other classes took us for
English, History, Latin, Science, Drawing and Woodwork. Drawing was taught by the Art master,
bald-headed Mr Dodds, who only had one arm.
But I only benefited from his teaching about line, form, perspective and
other matters for two years. Drawing and Woodwork, taught by Mr Robertson,
who had pebble-lensed glasses, were dropped when I reached Class IV. Lessons lasted for three-quarters of an hour,
and the lunch break for an hour.
Lunch consisted of three courses, starting
with soup and sliced bread – Brown Windsor soup, tomato soup and Scotch broth
made regular appearances. I also
remember mince and rice, fish dishes (haddock), and puddings made from tapioca,
sago and semolina. We hungrily
devoured everything that was put before us.
The youngest classes were placed at one end of the dining-hall and the
senior classes at the other end, nearer the dais on which the senior ephors
(prefects) and the Rector lunched.
Masters sat at the ends of all the other long tables, ensuring there
were no disturbances or throwing of bread.
Once-a-week sessions in the Gym, where we were
regularly weighed and our heights noted, now became part of the
curriculum. The instructor there was
Sergeant-Major SJ Atkinson, known as ‘The Bud’. He had been employed at the Academy, as
Assistant Gymnastic and Drill Instructor, back in 1910 and was wounded in the
First World War, where he lost the finger-tips of one of his hands. He was a short, fit and stocky, grey-haired
man in his early sixties and encouraged us to climb ropes, hang from the wooden
bars around the Gym, vault over wooden horses, and box each other. Not having much strength, I was hopeless at
all of this. Besides, I didn’t like hitting anyone or being
hit. Nonetheless, the Bud got me to stand
up straight. When I first came to him I
was rather droopy.
To one side of the Gym and at the rear of
the Science section were the dark and antiquated toilets and urinals. To reach them boys had to go down a flight
of wide stone steps, and a visit to the toilets was known as ‘going down the
hill.’ Behind the toilets, a few of the
older boys who smoked cigarettes indulged their secret vice there.
The Bud also conducted the daily
ten-minute PT sessions in the Yards for the whole of the Upper School. This
occurred during the mid-morning Break, weather permitting. These
sessions were patrolled by the junior and senior ephors, who might penalise any
slackers or mischievous boys with 100 lines – which meant that a relevant
phrase would have to be written out 100 times and the pages handed the
following day to the ephor concerned.
The Bud would stand in a white singlet or sweater and track-suit
trousers between the two central pillars of the school hall portico and bellow
the timing – ‘One! Two! Three!
Four!’ -- of whatever exercise we were doing in parallel long lines
facing him, and show us how it should be done.
He retired in 1950 and his place was taken by Sgt-Major McCarron. After
I left the Academy, the PT sessions were discontinued.
When I reached a more senior level in the
school the sessions in the Gym were devoted to indoor ball games and eventually
dropped out of my weekly class-list.
When I was in my last year, I was freed from rugby or cricket on
games-days, and given wasted instructions in playing tennis and putting the
shot. Both the instructor and I were relieved when
these useless practice sessions were over.
But in the beginning of my time in the Upper School
rugby or cricket practice was compulsory every Tuesday and Thursday after
lessons ended at 3.15.
You could be excused from games practice,
but you had to produce a note from a parent or doctor and hand it to your class
master. As I suffered from colds and
coughs and outgrew my strength as I grew taller and even thinner, I was able,
most gladly and not often enough, to escape the twice-weekly, 20-minute trek to
New Field, where there were the three boarding-houses, the pavilion and acres
of playing-fields. To get there, we had
to walk out of the back of the Academy, satchels on our backs and caps on our
heads, across a bridge over the Water of Leith, through a wooded dell, and up Arboretum Road,
chatting and fooling on the way. Inverleith Park was on the left and the Botanical
Gardens, where my mother used to take me when I was one going on two, was on the
right. Butterflies and bees interested
me. I would point at bees and say, ‘B!’
In the pavilion we changed into our
sporting gear. In wintertime I wore my
rugger jersey over my vest in a vain attempt to keep warm, and on the playing
field I avoided what I could of any action centred on the ball, oppressed by my
feeling that the pursuit of the odd-shaped ball and other boys was a futile
occupation. As I was usually put in the
second row of the scrum, and later on nominated by the master refereeing a game
as the lock (because of my height), I was able to disengage myself tardily from
the scrum and trudge or trot after the backs as they passed and kicked the
ball. The shoving and pushing and
warmth of bodies in the scrum at least had the merit of warming you up, though
the embracing of other boys’ backsides seemed a mite intimate. If by accident I somehow got the ball, I
promptly got rid of it before I could be tackled and hurled to the cold hard
ground. The final whistle was a blessed
relief. I never used the showers in the
pavilion, being embarrassed by my weedy physique and the nakedness of others,
and scraped off whatever mud had adhered to me and my boots before dressing as quickly
as I could.
Of
course if you wore a vest and never got your knees dirty, you were regarded
with tolerant scorn as a bit of a mummy’s boy.
But as I became even more self-conscious when puberty struck, I wasn’t
going to expose my skinny, white body, now sprouting embarrassing hairs, to
anyone, or participate in the extrovert horseplay of the showers.
The ethos of playing games, so admired at
the school, was completely alien to me.
This was partly because I was not a team player and because no one had
ever explained the rules of the games and what they were all about. Nor was I very strong. Cricket was at least played when it was
warmer, but having hay-fever didn’t help, and again I tried to avoid the action
by standing as far away from it as possible, hopefully on the boundary, all the
while dreading that some ball would hurtle my way.
For the record I once scored a try in a practice
game of rugby. The ball veered towards
me and I instinctively caught it. I couldn’t pass it on as no one was near me,
and as a muddy oaf from the opposing side was charging towards me I had no
option but to run – to avoid being tackled.
He didn’t catch me. Placing the
ball between the posts, I then wandered back, gasping for air, feeling
exhausted but curiously proud. But no
one said, ‘Well done.’ Nor did they
comment when I scored seven runs in a practice game of cricket and in the same
game, to everyone’s surprise, including mine, bowled someone out.
There was no alternative to the two terms
of rugby and one of cricket – both were compulsory. There
was hockey, which was not only fast but violent. If swimming or basketball had been available
I might have begun to enjoy games days. As it was, I just dumbly endured.
There
were 27 boys in Lower II and over the year my
place in the class drifted from 4 to 5, then 6 -- this despite the fact that my
work was deemed to be ‘satisfactory,’ ‘good’ and ‘very good.’
Back in 1922 Mr Hempson had sung the part
of the Defendant in a school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. He then sang the leading tenor role in three
subsequent G & S productions at the Academy. In 1929 he co-opted Aileen Davies, who had
been a D’Oyly Carte principal singer and was now the wife of an international
cricketer, DS Weir, to help him stage The Gondoliers, and for the next 21 years
they directed the Academy’s biennial G & S productions, in which I would
soon appear.
At the end of the Winter Term of 1947 the
Rector, Mr Seaman, commenting in my school report on what the masters had said
about my work, wrote ‘Very good. I
should think he ought to be a recruit to my Greek class next session. I am grateful to him for reading the lesson
very well at the Carol Service.’
I have no recollection of reading any
lessons, although I remember being entered for a Reading Prize, and not winning
it, I think because I mispronounced ‘pharaoh’, which I read as ‘pharoah.’ However, one of my other talents received
unexpected recognition when Mr Hempson, who over the year had graded my work in
his Geography class from 10, to 8, to 1, marked a painting I had made of
Archimedes holding a globe of the world not 10 out of 10, but 11 out of
10. That was surprisingly gratifying.
During the Spring Term, which ran from the
second week in January to the end of March, my test and exam results were less
than satisfactory, eliciting school report comments like ‘disappointing,’ ‘very
fair,’ ‘did poorly,’ ‘could do better.’
The Rector wrote, ‘Good of course.
But is it good enough?’ Over the
Summer Term, however, my academic performances in class improved, and the
masters were writing phrases like, ‘good work,’ and ‘very good.’ Mr Hempson concluded, ‘He has a real flair
for English work. A very satisfactory
session on the whole.’ And the Rector
wrote, ‘Very good indeed, except in Maths.
The indication that Maths is not his bent makes me think it a grave
error for him not to do Greek.’
One of the reasons for my poor academic
performances in the Spring Term of 1948 may have been that I was rehearsing for
my appearance in a dramatised version of RL Stevenson’s Treasure
Island, which was presented by the newly minted and short-lived Junior
Dramatic Society in the School Hall on Monday 12 July. Directed by the energetic Miss McKellar,
assisted by Miss Urquhart – they also enjoyed making us up in a backstage
classroom -- it had a large cast and five different scenes. Miss McKellar once said I had beautiful
hands, a remark I remembered as it was so odd and the idea had never occurred
to me.
According to the reviewer writing in the
Edinburgh Academy Chronicle, the play was admirably staged and lighted … ‘All
the scenes were effective, but a spontaneous round of applause greeted the
really beautiful setting of the deck of the Hispaniola, the stockade at night,
and Spyglass Hill at dawn.’ However, he
sadly failed to mention my stolid performance as Squire Trelawney, nor did he
speak of JD Caute’s as Captain Smollet.
Instead, WSM Nicoll (Long John Silver), EAW Slater (Dr Livesey) and his
younger brother JCK Slater (Jim Hawkins) were singled out for praise, as was MG
Elder, who played Pew and the Voice of the Parrot. Perky little JCK (Jock) Slater, while hiding
in the apple barrel on the ship, did some of his Latin homework for the
following day. But more about him
later.
It seems remarkable to me now that I
happened to be cast as Squire Trelawney, a Cornishman like my Cornish
Honeycombe ancestors, one of whom fought in Trelawney’s troop in the English
Civil War.
Partly because of the time we spent
rehearsing, I began associating with the oddball elements in it, like Tony
Slater (Dr Livesey), Adrian Carswell (Mrs Hawkins) and Bill Nicoll (Long John
Silver), though not with Jock Slater, who was a year and a half younger than
me, nor with John Caute, who was an intellectual boy and somewhat sporty, being
a speedy runner. I was invited to the
homes of the first three, Tony Slater, Carswell and Nicoll, but never invited
them to our cramped and threadbare, rented flat in Murrayfield Avenue. They had proper homes. It was interesting to see what these and
their parents were like. Their homes were grander, but none had a
mother as colourful as mine. Nicoll was an only child, as was Carswell, who
was also adopted. He lived in a house,
as opposed to Nicoll and the Slaters, who lived in rather large and gloomy
flats. Tony Slater, as his younger
brother, Jock, would do the following year, left the Academy at the end of the
Summer Term and went to an English boarding-school in Cumberland, Sedbergh. Their father was an Edinburgh physician and they were both
great-nephews of Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, Admiral of the Fleet in WW2.
Shakespearian productions were revived in
that same summer of 1948 with a production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by my
future English master, WH Hook. I was
in the audience, and despite the hard wooden chairs of the hall and the limited
sight-lines – the cast were partly masked by the people in front of me, for the
platform under the organ that was used as a stage was less than four feet high
– I was intrigued by what I saw. It was
the second play I had ever seen and the second I’d seen by William Shakespeare,
the first having been A Midsummer Night’s Dream at my sister’s school in Karachi. I was particularly impressed by the Romeo,
played by a senior boy called Magnus Magnusson.
It
was his last term – he was seven years older than me. He was tall and fair-haired, of Icelandic
origins, and was a figure of awe about the school, as he was captain of nearly
everything, as well as Head Ephor – ephor being a term borrowed from ancient Sparta and corresponding
to prefect. At the end of that term he
would be designated Dux (academic head of the school). Apart from the Academy connection, he and I
would have television and authorship in common later on – he translated several
Icelandic sagas, presented Mastermind on BBC TV for 25 years, and as President
of the Royal Society of Birds, he involved me in a staged reading about birds
and introduced me to the Queen at St James’s Palace in 1989. But that’s another story.
My mother, after seeing me perform in the
Academy’s plays, may have realised that I not only enjoyed acting but was also
good at it, and accordingly encouraged my nascent interest in the theatre. She was already aware that I liked going to
the cinema. And so, apart from visits
to the annual pantomime at the King’s Theatre at Christmas, she took me, though
possibly not Marion, to see some productions at the King’s and Empire Theatres
and some of the plays put on by the Wilson Barrett repertory company at the
Lyceum Theatre.
I remember that I was much affected and
enthralled by their production of JM Barrie’s haunting play, Mary Rose. When a girl, she vanishes on a remote
Scottish island while on holiday with her parents. She reappears 21 days later, unaware that
time has passed. Years later, and now
married with an infant son, she revisits the island with her husband and
vanishes again, this time for 25 years. When she returns, she fails to recognise her
middle-aged parents, her husband and her grown-up son, whom she accuses of
stealing her baby. Reconciled with
them and her ghostly situation, she returns to the other world of the
island. There are echoes of Mary Rose
in my first TV play, Time and Again, and in my first novel.
Towards the end of 1946, when I was ten,
my mother had taken me to see a pre-London tour of a production of Crime and
Punishment. It had a large cast, led by
John Gielgud as Raskolnikov, with Peter Ustinov and Edith Evans, and a complex,
shadowed set that matched the grimness of the story about a brutal murder. It was
the custom then for the audience to applaud the first appearance of leading
actors on the stage. But this didn’t
happen when Gielgud appeared in November 1953 in a touring production of NC
Hunter’s A Day by the Sea, which I saw.
His co-stars were Ralph Richardson, Sybil Thorndike and Irene Worth. A few weeks before the tour began he’d been
arrested for importuning men in a public toilet in Chelsea.
He pleaded guilty, said he was drunk, and a magistrate fined him
£10. When the production opened in Liverpool, the audience applauded when he appeared on
stage. Some cheered. But in Edinburgh
the audience expressed their disapproval by not applauding. And of course, at the time, I didn’t know
why.
Edinburgh
had five main theatres and about 40 cinemas, some of which were converted music
halls. The Regal cinema in Lothian Road showed
main-line films, as did the Dominion cinema in Churchill. The Cameo in Tollcross showed foreign films,
and at Poole’s Synod Hall in Castle
Street films set in ancient Greece and Rome
were shown in which the actors had enviable physiques and wore very few
clothes. Usherettes with torches showed
you to your seats, and at the interval they appeared in the stalls below the
screen with trays of ice-cream and soft drinks before walking slowly up the
aisles, still selling their wares. There
was also a small cinema in Princes
Street, the Monseigneur, which showed hour-long
programmes of newsreels and cartoons.
Time now to return to Murrayfield Avenue.
We were in the upstairs flat for three years. There were less lengthy walks now and more
excursions, by tram and coach, although Arthur’s Seat was extensively explored
and climbed. We visited Edinburgh Castle and the Zoo, where a small female
orangutan in a narrow cage stared at me with very sad eyes. Disconcertingly she looked at me and no one
else. We took coaches from St Andrew’s
Square to the beaches at Gullane and North Berwick and had tea at Melville Castle.
Sometimes Marion
was with my mother and me and sometimes not.
On my own I fished for minnows in the Water of Leith that ran under the
road-bridge at the bottom of our road.
Further away was Murrayfield Stadium and there, with a companion or two
from school, I watched Scotland
play rugby in the mist and on the muddy pitches of freezing Scottish
winters. Only the grandstand had seats
and impassioned crowds of roaring spectators stood on stepped banks on the
other three sides of the ground, while trains on their way to the Haymarket clanked
and whistled as they slid by beyond.
In our flat, when I was not doing my
homework, I was modelling things out of plasticine or painting imaginary scenes
of the Battle of Britain or of a train being bombed, or of Vesuvius erupting,
or a sailing ship in a storm, as well as the anthropomorphic activities of an
insect village. Less successful were my
attempts at reality -- a vase of flowers and even the modest church that was in
our road. We never attended a service
there.
Indoors the radio would be on in the
evenings for the BBC’s six o’clock news, and in June 1946 we heard that the USA had carried
out atom-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. In
November 1947 the radio and the papers were full of the wedding of Princess
Elizabeth and Lt Philip Mountbatten.
Prince Charles was born a year later.
In the meantime, I was listening weekly to such early evening radio programmes
as Dick Barton, Special Agent and the Paul Temple series. They had memorable theme tunes (the Devil’s
Gallop and Coronation Scot) as had Family Favourites at Sunday lunchtimes (With
a Song in my Heart). Every morning there was Housewives
Choice. In 1948 the comedy half-hour, ITMA,
began to be overtaken by Take it from Here.
These were early evening programmes and listened to, religiously, before
I went to bed.
I enjoyed going down to the shops at
Roseburn and buying fish and chips or white pudding and chips or black pudding
and chips for our evening meal. Fish
and chips were about the only food that wasn’t rationed then. Food rationing, which had begun in 1940,
lasted until July 1954. Even bread was
rationed from 1946 for two years and the sweet ration was halved. Potatoes were rationed the following year.
Whenever we went shopping we took our
brown or blue ration books, which had to be handed to a shopkeeper every time
any rationed goods were bought, whereupon he crossed off the listed item. One adult was allowed, per week, two ounces
of cheese, four ounces of bacon, eight ounces of sugar and one fresh egg. A packet of dried eggs was supposed to last
four weeks. Butter, jam, meat and tea
were rationed, as was milk. Meat could
be supplemented by whale meat, which was called snook. We
also had ration books for clothing.
They contained coloured coupons, which were cut out when an item was
bought. Every item of clothing was
given a value in coupons and every person had 60 coupons to last for a
year. Raincoats for adults used up 16
coupons; jackets 13; pyjamas, shirts and trousers 8; and shoes 7. Children’s clothes used up less.
Apart from being shamed by our
impoverished circumstances, compared with those of other boys at the Academy, I
was increasingly embarrassed by my extrovert mother, who was now dying her hair
black. When going out, she wore fashionable but ostentatious
hats and clothes, bright red lipstick and a dab of rouge. Her favourite scent was Lily of the
Valley. She was not abashed at digging
a compact mirror out of her handbag, wherever she was, and renewing her
lipstick or repowdering her nose. She also
had a clear voice and talked loudly and joked with every shopkeeper and with practically
everyone she met on a tram or in the street.
And then Bob Finlayson began to visit us
at weekends. When he was with the RAF
at Drigh Road,
I imagine that he worked in an office, in some clerical capacity. He probably did something similar in Glasgow where he now
lived.
My mother was 50 in August 1948 and he
would have been in his early thirties.
How she explained his presence in our flat I don’t know. I didn’t want to know anything about
him. If I wondered where he slept I
blotted the thought from my mind. I
avoided him as much as possible. But
this wasn’t possible at meal-times.
These were conducted in resolute silence by my sister and me, but if
spoken to we replied, politely enough but briefly. What was most off-putting to me was the fact
that his jaws cracked as he ate and that in the evening he smoked a pipe.
He was, I’m sure, a kind man, with a sense
of humour, and he no doubt did his best to thaw the frosty reception he
received from Marion and me. On every
visit he brought gifts, like oranges or bananas, which were not available in
our local shops. He also brought large
home-made apple pies, made by his mother, I suppose, and books for me. It’s
possible he worked in a second-hand book-shop.
He was certainly an avid reader and an admirer of an English
philosopher, Herbert Spencer. Some of the books he gave me were old pocket
editions, like Addison’s essays, the tales of
Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare,
published by Collins in six volumes which were bound in red leather and arrayed
in a box. Another set was the complete
works of George Bernard Shaw, published in 1926. I have them still, as well as the 12 volumes
of the third edition of Everyman’s Encyclopaedia, published in 1949-50.
This set may have marked the end of his
association with my mother, as my father returned to Scotland in 1950. On the other hand she used to travel over to
Glasgow in the
fifties to see some of her brothers, and she may have continued to meet up with
Bob Finlayson then. She was with me
when in the summer of 1958 I did a three-month stint as a radio announcer with
the Scottish Home Service in Glasgow. But more about that later.
At the end of September 1948 I moved into
Class III, where our class master was MH (Maurice) Cooke. There were 27 of us in his class and I was
now aged 12. Mr Cooke took us for English, History, and Scripture,
and in addition to Latin, Maths, Science, Drawing and Woodwork, I began having
lessons in French and Greek.
Outside the set of classrooms, of which
Class III was a part, was a lobby. All
the classrooms in the school had lobbies of different shapes and sizes, where
boys hung their caps, coats, macs and satchels on pegs along the walls. The lobby outside Class III also had a row of
wash-basins and a towel on a roller, and a separate tap from which cold
drinking water could be released into a steel mug, steel being tougher than tin
and less likely to be damaged. Water has never tasted so cold and refreshing
as when it was gulped out of that mug on a hot summer’s day.
The Rector, Mr Seaman, took us for Greek,
and at the end of the Winter Term he wrote, reporting on my Greek classes,
‘Very good work and progress; he is developing, as I should expect, a pleasant
Greek script.’ I was placed third out
of 22 boys in that class.
In
his Rector’s Report, commenting on what the other masters had written about me,
he said, ‘Many good things this term – Edinburgh Castle,
the small choir and a high standard of work in most subjects. But he should also ponder well the wise
words of his Class Master.’ Mr Cooke
had written, ‘He enjoys subjects that appeal to the eye or feelings and he
appreciates beauty. I hope he will realise that some subjects
cannot become interesting until a lot of dull work is overcome.’
The Rector’s reference to Edinburgh Castle was occasioned by a plasticine
model of the Castle that I had made for the one-day Exhibition of boys’ hobbies
that were displayed in the school hall that term. It was about a foot square, took a lot of
finicky work, and was based on pictures and maps in a guidebook, on photos,
postcards and my own visits to the Castle.
It must have looked quite impressive.
The previous year, my contribution to the Exhibition had been a
two-level portrayal of dinosaurs in a Jurassic setting. The dinosaurs, which were based on what I
remembered of that superbly imagined and crafted Disney film, Fantasia, and saw
in picture-books, were all made from plasticine, while their background of
bushes and trees was made from a mix of plasticine and other materials.
The small choir, to which he refers, must
have sung at the Carol Service or at a School Concert. But I remember nothing of this.
At the end of the Spring Term, when I was
placed ninth in the class, both Mr Cooke and the Rector commented on the fact
that I had not been at the school for several months. Mr Cooke wrote, ‘His work has been much
affected by his absence … He is an intelligent boy and it seems a very great
pity that such a strain should be put upon his intelligence by his frequent
absence.’ Other masters wrote, ‘Fair’
‘Very fair’ ‘Fair only’ and only three said, ‘Good.’ The Rector wrote, as if to ameliorate their
view of my decline, ‘He does not cease to deserve our praise.’
What had happened was that both my sister
and my mother contracted mumps, one after the other, and I was quarantined for
three weeks at a time, if not more. As
a result, I was away from the Academy for two months or so, including the
beginning of the Summer Term. To keep
abreast of what the other boys were being taught I was sent lists of school-work
to be done at home. Somehow I wasn’t
also smitten with mumps.
There was another result, which depressed
me, although this was countered by the fact that while I was quarantined I
didn’t have to trudge up to New Field twice a week to play rugby during the
bitter-cold months of the year. As I
was away from school so much in this period, I was removed from playing a
leading role in the forthcoming Academy production of The Gondoliers.
I
had been cast as Gianetta (the role my Aunt Donny had played long ago) after
various boys with treble voices had been tested at the start of the Winter Term
by the producers, Aileen Weir and Mr Hempson.
No doubt Mr Howells, who would have played the piano during the
auditions, also expressed an opinion. The
fact that I had already appeared in two Academy productions, albeit junior
ones, may have influenced my casting.
Playing a girl didn’t present much of a
problem. Acting was all about dressing up after all,
about playing a part, and anyway all the girls’ roles and the female chorus
were played by boys. I knew nothing
about the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan but was rather pleased to discover
that there were so many tuneful songs and that Gianetta had so much to sing and
so many words to say. Rehearsals were
in the school hall on Fridays after lessons ended and lasted about an
hour. They started in the Winter Term
and continued during the Spring Term, leading up to the staged performances in
May 1949.
When my sister and mother got mumps I
couldn’t rehearse and accordingly the role of Gianetta had to be given to
someone else. That someone turned out
to be the Jim Hawkins of the previous year’s Treasure
Island, JCK (Jock) Slater.
However, after the Easter
holiday, when I returned to the school, having been demoted to the female
chorus, I was informed that I had been promoted to be the leading chorus-girl,
Fiametta. RDD Scott, who had been cast
as Fiametta, had either been replaced or had left the Academy – I think the latter. There were some solo lines to sing and at
least I didn’t have to strain to reach the high G of Gianetta’s solo song.
Unfortunately, the typed slips of the
programme still carried RDD Scott’s name, not mine, so my first singing role
was uncredited. That hurt.
The female chorus of Contadine was
remarkably flat-chested as, quite sensibly, we didn’t wear any padding or bras,
and apart from our Italian peasant-like outfits, we wore white gym-shoes and
had bare and (mostly) unhairy legs. Wigs
were superfluous as we had snoods or bandanas around our heads, with tufts of
curls poking out of them over our ears.
Prep mistresses, such as Miss McTavish and Miss McKellar, deftly dabbed
us with some rouge and powder to modify any sweaty, shiny faces. The
classroom backstage where the female principals and the Contadine changed and
were made up was separate from the men’s changing-room.
The show opened, after the Overture, with a
group of boys, while pretending to be 20 love-sick maidens and making up posies
of fake roses, sang the opening chorus – ‘List and learn, ye dainty roses,
roses white and roses red, why we bind you into posies ere your morning bloom
has fled.’ ‘Two there are for whom, in
duty, every maid in Venice
sighs,’ I warbled in the first solo. The male and female chorus numbered in fact
about 34, the male chorus being boosted vocally by five of the masters,
including Mr Hempson. How the whole
cast of about 45 boys and masters fitted onto that postage stamp of a stage for
the boisterous dancing of the cachuca in the Finale I do not know.
Between us and the audience there was a
small orchestra, which was vigorously conducted by Mr Howells, and the
performances over three nights were hugely enjoyable. The Gondoliers is the happiest and best of
Gilbert and Sullivan shows. If I had
had a really good voice I would have liked to have been an opera singer. For singing as well as acting on a stage
are, I think, the most satisfying ways of expressing oneself as a performer.
The reviewer of the show wrote in The EA
Chronicle, ‘The best of the principals were excellent; but, perhaps, there were
not quite so many as usual of a high order.
The chorus sang excellently and danced the cachuca with sprightliness;
but some of the contadine (not the principals) looked rather muscular, and
scarcely handled their roses white and roses red in a manner likely to win the
heart of a gondolier.’ Having (mostly)
praised the principals he dwelt on Gianetta and Tessa. He said, ‘Tessa (I Dewar) was pert and
coquettish, in the true Savoyard tradition, and, for a Venetian, surprisingly
blonde. Gianetta (JCK Slater)
captivated the audience by her diminutive size, her solemn innocence, and her
well-drilled singing; she deserves special credit for so quickly mastering her
part as understudy … Contadine (RG Honeycombe, AAN Carswell and GAH Walker)
gave good performances, if sometimes we remembered the Academy and forgot
Barataria.’
There was no doubt, I have to say, that
Jock Slater was a better Gianetta than I would have been. I was gawky, tall and skinny. Little Jock was what is now called
cute. He had a sweet face and smile and
the doe-eyed slightly slanting eyes of an Audrey Hepburn. He also sang very well. As he left at the end of that term I never
saw him again, until … But that’s another story -- which I might as well spell
out now.
In September 1969 the Queen visited the
new premises of ITN in Wells
Street. On
entering the newsroom she was introduced to assorted heads of departments and
to Andrew Gardner and Reginald Bosanquet.
Ivor Mills and I, though not chosen to be presented, decided to be
present, and lurked as if we were engaged on some important business at the other
end of the newsroom. Suddenly one of
the royal entourage, a vision in naval uniform with gold-braid accoutrements,
detached himself from the group and headed straight for me with hand
outstretched. ‘Jock Slater!’ he
exclaimed with a smile. ‘Remember
me? I was at the Academy.’ ‘Oh yes,’ I said, duly astonished and somewhat
amazed.
It turned out that having pursued a naval
career Jock Slater was now Equerry to the Queen. He said he would love to have a chat and
that I must come to dinner. Within a
week or so I did – at St James’s Palace, where he was accommodated. There were about twelve guests, all with rather
superior ranks and titles, at the dinner-table, which was laden with
monogrammed silver, gilt plates and such a variety of wine glasses, forks and
knives that, never having seen anything like this before, I didn’t know where
to begin and had to watch what others did, to see the order and use of each
glass, knife and fork. Meanwhile, liveried
palace flunkeys served us.
Way out of my depth, I must have drunk too
much, as I remember little else, except that one of the Queen’s ladies in
waiting, Lady Mary Morrison, who was sitting on my right, remarked,
indiscreetly but generously, that I was the Queen’s favourite newsreader. Well!
This predilection was no doubt due to a certain empathy among Scots –
the Queen being half Scottish, and me being three-quarters Scottish. Lady Mary was also a Scot.
In later years Jock Slater rose to even
greater heights, being knighted and becoming First Sea Lord and Chief of the
Naval Staff in 1996. How apposite, it
seems now, that his two appearances on stage at the Academy should take him to
sea and that Gianetta should sing about how glorious it was to be ‘a right-down
regular Royal Queen,’ sitting on a golden throne, ‘with a crown instead of a
hat on her head and diamonds all her own.’
In my school report at the end of the
Summer Term I was placed ninth out of the 26 boys in Class III. My schoolwork was generally considered to be
‘satisfactory.’ Mr Cooke wrote, ‘He is
a very sensible boy who does not easily become flustered. I hope that his growing pains are over and
that he will have better health to consolidate next year.’ It seems that it wasn’t just mumps that
kept me away from school. The Rector wrote,
‘He has once again done very well and I hope for great things from him.’
Maurice Cooke was a pleasant, thin-faced
man with short grey hair and a way of speaking that sounded as if he was
chewing something. I would learn much
later that he had been wounded in WW2 and awarded the Military Cross. He was in the habit of having an annual
photo taken of all the boys in each of his Class IIIs. The one taken in the summer of 1949 shows
him to one side of the 26 of us arranged on four rows on the steps leading up
to the main doors of the Gym. I’m the
tallest one in the back row, standing between DM Baxendine and Adrian Carswell
and smiling cheerfully, with a characteristic scoop of dark brown hair falling
over my right forehead -- my hair was parted on the left. The other three tall boys in the back row
were CF Stewart, HG Usher and GPT Whurr.
I got on well enough with all the boys, but tended to associate with the
oddball and clever ones, like WSM Nicoll (Long John Silver) and WP Gracie, and
not with the sporty types and the country boys. Although JD Caute and I had some things in
common, both being good at English and History and having been born abroad, I
had very little to do with him. This
could have been because of our enforced intimacy in The Princess and the
Swineherd.
In
the Collection of Biographical Sketches called 175 Accies, published in 1999 to
coincide with the 175th anniversary of the founding of the school,
(John) David Caute wrote, ‘From the age of nine to twelve I wore the blue
blazer and silver laurels of the Academy, a rather fierce initiation in
academic education which, in my increasingly fragmented memory, boils down to
variations of clacken-and-ball, a few strong personalities, masters and boys --
and the barbaric tawse.’ More about the tawse later.
He continued, ‘I learned to disguise my
attachment to the England whence I came, and to cheer on the schoolboy terraces
of Murrayfield when the white shirts [England] were trounced by the blues
[Scotland] … I had a number of things to disguise and hide, including being
half-Jewish, born in Egypt, christened a Catholic, and too fond of Miss
McKellar’s adjustments to my velvet costume as Captain Smollet in Treasure
Island … While at the Academy and before taking the Common Entrance exam to
Wellington (where the cane replaced the tawse but rarely for faulty
scholarship), I had written numerous short stories for Mr Cooke and for
myself. English and History were my
subjects … Due to Hitler I was no good at Latin, Maths and French and
invariably emerged at the end of term cringing in the bottom half of the
class.’
I wonder if Mr Cooke ever imagined he
might have two best-selling authors in his Class of 1948-1949 who also wrote
plays. And one day I would act in a play
written by David Caute. But more about
that later.
During the spring and summer holidays of
1949 there had been more outings by coach or train to North Berwick, one with
Aunt Ada, and a trip that took in Linlithgow
Palace, once home of Mary
Queen of Scots. Again this meant little to me. The ruins themselves appealed, but their
history was too fractured to be interesting.
Although I was at a Scottish school, the Scottish history we were taught
was cursory and superficlal. Recent
history wasn’t covered at all. We
learned nothing about the Crimean War, the Boer War and the two World Wars, and
little about the events of the previous century.
Although the ruins of castles and abbeys
have always appealed to me, a few, as with other sites of ruined cities, like Ephesus, have had a
special attraction or significance.
They have seemed familiar, as if I had been there before. The Lowlands of Scotland are littered with
the remains of what were once small but sturdy castles, but in only one have I
felt at home. This was Crichton Castle,
about 12 miles south-east of Edinburgh. I became aware of it during some CCF
exercises in the area and made a point of visiting the site when I could –
although I don’t remember when or with whom.
Crichton, constructed in the last years of
the 14th century, was rebuilt about 1450 and given to the first Earl
of Bothwell in 1488. It was the home of
the fourth Earl, James Hepburn, who married Mary Queen of Scots after the
murder of her young husband, Lord Darnley.
Mary visited Crichton more than once.
The castle was built around a courtyard, its four sides or ranges
variously designed and of different heights.
The north range had an unusual Italianate facade and a stone staircase
with a landing – the first of its kind in Scotland – which led up the main
dining hall on the first floor. To say
that I recognised these features seems absurd.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if one of my Scottish ancestors, not
necessarily one of the Bothwells, had lived there long ago.
In 1949 I acquired a camera, a box
Brownie, and took some snaps of our outings and of Oxgangs Road. These I dated in my albums by the year and
not the month and year, never the day. They show that in 1949 there were coach trips
to Loch Katrine and Aberfoyle, to Melville
Castle for tea, and that there was a
picnic by a road overlooking the Forth
Bridge, across which trains crawled
along, passing to and from Fife. The
picnic was made possible because Aunt Ada, who was a cook/companion to a widow,
Mrs Henderson, at Gilmerton, used to drive Mrs Henderson’s car. My mother and I used to visit Mrs Henderson’
s house now and then, where Ada served us lavish teas and I kept quiet as the
women talked, never speaking unless spoken to.
I was still my mother’s regular
companion. Her restless and energetic
nature required activity, such as shopping expeditions and outings, and she
also required my presence, so that I might benefit theoretically from fresh air
and some exercise and she be admired for having such a handsome young escort in
tow. I was her prize possession. Where food, whether lunch or tea, was
included I put up with the tedium of being with middle-aged women. I was only there for the fare.
In August 1949, Marion, my mother and I
had a week-long holiday in St Andrew’s.
I didn’t like the place, and it was there that I had one of those nights
of terror, in which I awoke in a pitch-black bedroom and knew that there was
something terrible, blacker than the night, standing at the foot of my
bed. I couldn’t move, petrified with
fear, but endeavoured to inch a hand under the bedclothes, unseen by the thing,
towards the bedside lamp. With a final
fearful lunge I switched it on. And
there was nothing there! After a while,
after I had calmed, I was able to switch off the lamp and drift off uneasily to
sleep.
St Andrew’s, with its ruined cathedral
and castle ruins, had a reputation for ghosts as well as golf, and I might have
been spooked by reading something about a ghostly monk in the guidebook. But I wasn’t dreaming. I was awake. A similar night-terror happened in Cornwall when I was a student at Oxford -- more about that later -- and
related events have occurred since, in which I not only saw an apparition but
in one instance heard it. Years later I
developed a theory about how these inexplicable happenings might be
explained. The mind is a strange place,
a most complex machine wired in a million ways that we may never fully understand. But more of this later too.
About this time the parents of WP Gracie
contacted my mother and asked if I would go on holiday with them. I was no particular friend of their son, who
was an odd-looking boy with a droopy lower lip and lank brown hair. At
Prayers one morning he had unhappily wet himself and was known from then on as Wet-Pants
Gracie (his initials being WP). With my
vivid imagination heightened by listening to Dick Barton and Paul Temple I
indicated I didn’t want to go on holiday with the Gracies, all virtual
strangers, and my refusal was also prompted by my conviction that they planned
to kill me. Gracie’s parents went as
far as visiting my mother in an attempt to persuade her, and me, that they’d
like me to holiday with them, to no avail.
I hid in my bedroom, even more convinced that the parents, and WP, had
evil intentions. I didn’t go.
When the Winter Term began I moved up into
Class IV, a larger classroom than Mr Cooke’s.
It was off the school hall at the front of the main building, and junior
ephors made their formal entrance into the school hall through a double door at
one end of the room when the school assembled in the hall every morning for
Prayers. During Prayers, a prayer was
read, a hymn was sung, and announcements were made by the Rector from the
platform below the organ. The youngest
boys sat in the hard wooden chairs at the front, and the other boys and classes
were graded from front to back, with the oldest and senior boys, those in the
Seventh classes, at the rear. The hall
was oval, and a raised walkway led around the well of the hall from the main
doors, which opened out onto the temple-like portico with its six grey Doric
columns.
Inside the hall the walkways curved around
the hall to the central dais or platform.
Some masters, but by no means all, sat in chairs nearest the platform,
while senior ephors sat on one side of the walkway, with junior ephors opposite
them. Behind both sets of ephors
paintings and pictures of distinguished Academicals lined the walls and silver
sporting trophies stood in niches. A
narrow gallery below the oval glass-panelled drum that crowned the hall
followed the curves of the walkways below.
It was lined with chairs and along the gallery’s edge were inscribed the
names, in gold, of all the boys who had ever been Dux.
We were summoned by a bell for the start
of Prayers at 9.0 am and the ding-dong of the bell announced the end of every
class. This bell was positioned at one end of the
library, and activated by the Janitor pulling on a rope. When not in use the rope was locked inside
an oblong box on the wall to prevent its misuse, mischievous or otherwise.
Magnus Magnusson, in his history of the
school, The Clacken and the Slate, wrote, ‘To schoolboys, Janitors are simply
there. They don’t have names or private
lives … They tend to be somewhat anonymous men, and the School records do
little to invest them with personality.
But most of them had something memorable about them to schoolboy eyes –
a ruddy face, a missing hand, a blind eye.’
The Janitor and his wife lived in the Janitor’s lodge, which was beside
the third set of gates that led from Henderson Row into the school Yards (as
they were called). The Masters’ Lodge,
on the other side of the Yards, was beside the first set of gates. A new Janitor arrived at the school at the
same time as me. This was CQMS Peter
McKeich, whose name I never knew at the time.
He had worked as an office boy at the Academy before WW2, during which
he saw action with the Royal Scots. The
most memorable thing about him was his thin, flushed, red face, his formal
costume of white tie and tails, and a top hat.
The Class Master of Class IV was BGW
Atkinson, nicknamed ‘the Bag’, a shortened version of ‘Bagwash’, derived from
his initials. A tall, gaunt,
ascetic-looking man, he came to the Academy in 1925 with a formidable
reputation as a rugby player and a cricketer – he batted for Middlesex and
played for Scotland against Australia,
whacking a six off Keith Miller. At the Academy he was the coach of the Firsts
in both cricket and rugby. Years later
I learned, to my surprise, that he lived with Mr Cooke.
Mr Atkinson also had a formidable
reputation as the most fearsome wielder of the tawse of all the masters. Mr Hempson (but not Mr Cooke) had used it to
discipline or punish back-sliding, badly behaved or inattentive boys. JD Caute would write that Mr Atkinson ‘translated
terra firma as “firmer terror” ’. The
Bag was usually late arriving in class at the start of lessons and someone in
the class would act as look-out as we awaited his arrival. When he was sighted striding across the
Yards, his black gown, grown greenish with age, billowing behind him, we all
hushed, sat still and became instantly studious. In Class IV we sat side by side, two to a
desk, as we did in most classrooms.
The tawse was a long black leather strap,
which Mr Atkinson kept in the drawer of his high desk coiled up like a
snake. He had a laconic and terse style
of speaking, and when indicating his exasperation with someone or something
would exclaim, disgustedly, ‘Christmas on wheels!’ When an offence had been committed, whether
of an academic or anarchic sort – you might be tawsed for coming last in a test
– he would say, almost wearily, ‘Come out here,’ open the lid of his desk
drawer and unleash the tawse within. A
thrill of something like horror would run through the class as he told the
miscreant to hold out his hand -- his left hand if he was right-handed. We watched unblinking as the unhappy,
tight-lipped boy extended his arm with the palm of his hand upward. That was what was so awful about this type
of beating, for the hand held out in such a trusting way was then dealt a most
violent blow – not across the hand, as with most masters, but from fingers to
wrist. Usually only one blow was
struck, but sometimes there were three.
The offender tried not to wince or cry, but tears would come to his eyes
and he might squeak or gasp. With his
good hand he would clutch his injured arm and return to his seat, where he sat,
rocking himself and hunched, sometimes with tears running down his cheeks, his throbbing
hand between his legs or thrust into his arm-pit. The rest of us shuddered and grieved for
him.
It once happened to me. I was probably whispering to my neighbour
when I should have been silently doing a Latin test. ‘Honeycombe! Come out here!’ Fearfully I did as I was bid. I don’t know whether Mr Atkinson derived a
certain amount of sadistic satisfaction from tawsing us. He certainly swung the arm holding one end
of the tawse as if he were a fast bowler hurling a ball at a batsman. Such was the force of the blow that it
sometimes drew blood from the thin skin of the lower arm that was exposed when
a jacket and shirt-sleeve rode up the extended arm. My hurt hand went red and seemed to swell
up. It hurt horribly, as if it had been
inside a hive of bees, and tears came to my eyes.
Other masters were comparatively benign. Not so the senior ephors when they
administered six of the best in the Ephors’ Room in the Master’s Lodge. Here the accused had to wait outside the
door until summoned inside. Some
uselessly thought to protect their bottoms by magazine papers or even slim
books. Once inside, the offender was faced
by a tribunal of all seven ephors, sitting behind a table. They outlined the offence and asked if the
accused had anything to say in his defence.
If found guilty he was solemnly sentenced to two, four or six wallops
given by a clacken. Magnus Magnusson,
describing this in his book about the Academy, wrote, ‘Unless the boy exercised
his right of appeal to the Rector (which did not happen often), he was required
to place his head under the edge of the large table in the Ephors’ Room, with his
hands on top, whereupon the ephors, in turn, would deal him a stinging blow on
the buttocks … Left-handed ephors were considered a great asset.’
This never happened to me, and I don’t
think these beatings instilled any discipline in unruly boys or caused any
mental or physical harm. Though now considered to be barbaric, they
probably did some good. No one, I
imagine, was so traumatised by being beaten by clacken or tawse that he
acquired a lust for self-flagellation or a desire to whip his children or
wife. Nonetheless the threat of being
beaten and tawsed promoted a degree of fear in me, to the extent that I
sometimes dreaded going to school, especially on a games day, and quailed when
a junior or senior ephor spoke to me. Now I think about it, muted fear
characterised my years at the Academy – fear of authority figures and older
boys, fear of what others might say about me, or say to me, or do. And every week after school there were games
days to be endured, and the CCF. I was
only untroubled and comparatively happy at school in my last two years.
Friday
afternoons after school were now occupied with the activities of the Combined
Cadet Force, the CCF, which had been in existence as such since the war. An Air Force unit was also part of the CCF,
as was a Pipe Band, which practised in classrooms with their chanters and by
drumming on the desks, or with their proper drums and bagpipes out in the
Yards. When on show or on parade they wore kilts with
a Black Watch tartan, as did the rest of us at summer camps. At school we wore full battledress, gaiters,
boots, belts and Lowland bonnets, and sometimes drilled with .303 rifles.
There is a photograph, taken in the spring
of 1952, of the CCF marching past the pillars of the school hall. CSM Marr in a kilt with no sporran leads the
column, which includes JW Gordon, RK Anderson, WP Gracie and myself. We look rather untidy and the rifles slope
at uneven angles. Captain PDL Ford, in
a kilt, no sporran, and wearing glasses, observes us with his back to the
Library, where the time on the clock is half-past three. I surmise that the full parade of the CCF began
at 3.15, lasting perhaps until 4.15.
As cadets we were drilled in platoons by
boys promoted to corporal or sergeant.
They, or a master in uniform, instructed us in map-reading and we
learned about the cleaning and firing of the rifles. Later on we had target practice, with live
rounds, at a rifle-range. Sometimes we
were bussed out into the Scottish countryside, where, sweatily crawling among
thistles, flies and cowpats, we uselessly pretended to be a platoon or company
in attack. Our hiding-places were
usually given away by my explosive hay-fever sneezes during the last two weeks
of June.
My mother, who was in the habit of boldly writing
to the papers when some incident or grievance inspired her, penned a blast to
the Evening News about this time. She
kept cuttings of nine of the letters she wrote over a 15-year period, signing
herself as ‘Choking’ ‘Irritated’ ‘Maddened’ ‘Unbiased’ ‘Sympathetic’ and
‘Bankrupt.’ The reproving letter she
wrote concerning my CCF activities was signed ‘A Mother.’
She
demanded, ‘Who is responsible for this vigorous Army training for school-boys
of 14 years of age? I strongly
protest! It is not in the school
curriculum … The child, for he is only a child, comes home at 5.30 pm or later
on Thursdays, tired after Rugby, has his home lessons to do, which takes him
until 10 pm to finish, then he has his Army harness to polish and clean. Boys of 14 years are in the growing and
developing stage, and I strongly disapprove of Army training at this age. Surely 16 years is quite soon enough. They are not so likely then to suffer from
overtiredness and strain … Also, is it necessary to produce such enormous Army
boots for boys?’
The CCF ‘harness’ consisted of a belt and
boots, and they would have been polished and cleaned on a Sunday. Fridays after school were given over to
activities involving various societies and to rehearsals for concerts and
plays.
Mr Atkinson took us for Scripture,
History, English Composition and Literature.
In History I was placed sixth at the end of the Summer Term, in a class
of 20 boys, and was seventh overall in English. Drawing and Woodwork had now been dropped.
In Class IV, we were being taken for
English one day by Bag Atkinson and were reading aloud from a chapter of A Tale
of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, taking it in turns to read when nominated by
him. A pointless exercise, but it
passed the time. The Bag, checking that
Morrison was awake and attentive, called his name, and JDR (Poker) Morrison,
not a good reader, began to read. He was
a tall, black-haired, good-looking boy with a high colour and pouting
lips. He was also a House-boy. Whether his nickname had anything to do with
his red cheeks or an outsize penis I do not know. But
thus the other boys in Houses had baptised him.
A pallid contemporary of his,
another House-boy, was called, because he had bulbous eyes, Fish Macmillan.
We were somnolently following what Poker Morrison
was reading in our copies of the book when he misread the text and announced,
‘Mr Lorry let off.’ Unfortunately he failed to correct his error
and paused, giving the rest of us a chance to interpret what he had said and be
seized by muted hysteria, by waves of suppressed giggling and choking. The Bag, no doubt controlling his own
amusement, ordered us to settle down and appointed someone else to carry
on. Poker Morrison should of course
have said, ‘Mr Lorry left off.’
My general progress in class continued to
decline. At the end of December Mr
Atkinson merely remarked that I had done ‘A good term’s work.’ Mr Heath, who was now teaching us Latin and
Greek, and liked to sit beside us, usually with an arm uncomfortbly draped around
our shoulders, was more complimentary.
My best subject was now French – I was fourth in that class -- and the
worst was Mathematics (22nd out of the 28 boys in that class). Amazingly I was also fourth in Science. Overall, out of the 22 boys in Class IV, I
was eleventh. By the end of the Spring
Term I had dropped to twelfth, having improved in English but worsened in Latin
and French. ‘A satisfactory term’s
work, with fairly steady progress,’ opined Mr Atkinson. However, at the end of the Summer Term, in
July 1950, I was back to being eleventh in the class, which was not the
improvement it seems, as the class had shrunk to 20. Two of the boys in Class IV had left the
school. One was probably JD Caute.
The masters who taught me commented on my
poor end of term exam results. But the
Rector was pleased to note that in Maths I had moved up to 18th out
of 29 boys in that class. He wrote, ‘I
am glad to see the promised improvement in Maths, which he will, I hope,
maintain. Admirable as a “gilded
serpent” and in most other ways as well.’
This was a reference to my appearance, in
May 1950, as Goneril in the school production of King Lear.
The play was directed by Mr Hook and
staged on that impossible low platform at the end of the school hall. It was given three performances, beginning
on Tuesday, 23 May. It had a huge cast
of 49 boys – no parts were doubled -- and featured some of those who had played
leading roles in The Gondoliers. Don
Alhambra, WJS Fleming, was King Lear; the Duchess of Plaza-Toro, WF Harris, was
Edgar; Giorgio, a minor gondolier, CDL Clark, was Edmund, and Inez, RM
Greenshields, who had also played Juliet to Magnus Magnusson’s Romeo, was the
Duke of Gloucester. Rehearsals, on
Mondays and Wednesdays after school, began in the Winter Term and sometimes
lasted for two hours.
Albany,
Goneril’s husband, was played by JJ Clyde.
Though a pale-faced Scot, he was far from being the ‘milk-livered man’
and ‘vain fool’ of Goneril’s scorn. He
was Dux of the school in 1951, went on to study law and was called to the
Scottish Bar. A Supreme Court judge, he
was given a life peerage in 1996 and made a member of the Privy Council.
Tessa in The Gondoliers, Ian Dewar, was
cast as my sister, Regan, in King Lear, but he didn’t take rehearsals too
seriously and was soon replaced by AC (Anton) McLauchlan. Ian was a tall, fair-haired congenial fellow,
with a big mouth and big lips. When
rehearsing a scene together at the beginning of Lear, he would burst out
laughing when I said to him, with evil and sinister meaning, ‘Pray you, let us
hit together,’ and ‘We must do something!
And i’ the heat!’ Ironically
Ian went on to be a professional actor and a director, mainly of musicals, and
was based, when I last heard of him, at the London Studio Centre in North London.
In rehearsing King Lear I had no idea what
I was saying most of the time, although I said it nastily and with some
vigour. Lear was even nastier,
especially to me. ‘Thou marble-hearted
fiend!’ he stormed at me. ‘More hideous
when thou show’st with child than the sea-monster!’ ‘Detested kite!’ he shouted, and cursed me
and my womb tremendously -- ‘If she must teem, create her child of spleen, that
it may live and be a thwart disnatured torment to her! … that she may feel how
sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’ I was quite upset by all this verbal
vitriol, and when Lear wept self-pitying tears of rage, tears came to my own
eyes. With a long white beard and greying hair,
Fleming was a wonderful Lear.
Even though I was only 13½ I was now six
feet tall and taller than Lear. I must
have looked rather like my mother.
Wearing an excess of rouge, a dab of lipstick and a high tiara on my
dark red wig with two long plaits that dangled down my chest, I was also taller
than Goneril’s lover, Edmund, whom I had to kiss towards the end of the play,
saying seductively as I did so, ‘This kiss, if it durst speak, would stretch
thy spirits up into the air. Conceive
and fare thee well.’ Whereupon he bowed
his head and I chastely kissed his page-boy wig. More about him later.
As rehearsals gathered momentum during the
Spring Term of 1950 my academic performances suffered. I was beginning to enjoy being on a stage
and those magic moments when the curtain rose on a fantasy world. In fact our stage curtains parted. The
audience sat in the dark, looking and listening to us as, well lit and
costumed, we played our parts, emoting and expostulating as the play required,
acting out a story. And then there was
the loud applause that greeted the actors at the end.
There were other reasons for my lapses
during lessons and exams. I was
post-pubescent, we had moved out of Murrayfield
Avenue, and in the early summer of 1950 my father
retired and came to live with us in a bungalow at Fairmilehead.
5. EDINBURGH, 1950-53
The move from 34 Murrayfield Avenue to a rented
bungalow at 48 Oxgangs Road
in Fairmilehead may have been made in May 1950, a few weeks before my father
returned to Scotland. On the other hand, we may have moved several
months earlier, as there are three photos, taken outside 48 Oxgangs Road, which follow photos of
The Gondoliers in an album and are on a page marked 1949. My mother might have decided on the move
when she knew my father was going to retire and would receive a retirement
payment from Standard Vacuum, as well as an annuity. Perhaps there had also been some bother with
Mrs Bucher, our landlady. In any event,
the rents for the flat and the house would have been about the same, as the
bungalow was so far from the centre of the city, on its southern boundary.
Number 48 was a house of reddish stone
with a red-tiled roof and an unadorned garden at the front and rear, each with
areas of grass. A yellowish laurel hedge
lined the wall at the front, where there was a garden gate. Marion
occupied the upstairs attic-like room, whose window overlooked the road. My
mother’s and father’s bedroom was on the left of the front door; the
sitting-room was on the right; and at the rear were my bedroom, the dining-room
and the kitchen, which had a back door leading down steps to the rear
garden. The bathroom was between the
kitchen and the sitting-room and at the opposite end of the hall were the
stairs that led up to Marion’s
room.
Fairmilehead was about four miles south of
the city centre and at the end of a tram terminus at the top of Comiston Road. The view looking south from our bungalow was
of the Pentland Hills, a view dominated by the highest of these grass-covered
hills, Caerketton and Allermuir, a prospect I would see, in all weathers, for
the next four years. The hills had also
been visible from the rear windows of the Murrayfield flat.
Down in the valley between them and nearer
us was the village of Swanston, where Robert Louis Stevenson, at the Academy
from the age of 11 for a couple of years, from 1861, had spent a few summers in
a large white-washed house, called Swanston Cottage, which his parents had
leased from 1867 to 1880. Swanston was
an idyllic place: with a small wood, thatched cottages (unusual in Scotland) and a
babbling brook running through the village and past some old farm
buildings. Below the steep screes of
Caerketton was the T Wood, which in fact was cruciform in shape, its topmost
arm being hidden in a dip in the hillside from anyone seeing it from Oxgangs Road.
I rambled over the hills, with or without
a companion, every year, once in winter.
I scaled the screes until I got scared as they broke and slid beneath
me; I explored the shadowy recesses of the T Wood; I reached the summits of
Caerketton and Allermuir; and once with MG Harvey (Mick) trekked beyond
Allermuir, along the hills on the other side and down into a valley, where we
pushed over the trunks of a few rotted trees as if we were the children of
Hercules. We came back by coach. But never did I visit RL Stevenson’s old
home in Swanston. I wasn’t interested. I knew nothing about him, apart from the
fact that he’d been at the Academy, and I’d read none of his books. Besides, I was becoming totally absorbed in
my own interests and creative pursuits and even more so in myself.
My body bothered me – my feeble, thin and
bony frame, which had the meanest of muscles and not much strength. Spoonfuls of thick Radio Malt, urged on me
by my mother, seemed to have no improving effect. But in most of the comics that were read by
boys, and in some magazines, body-building courses were consistently advertised,
which promised to turn a weedy youth into a strong and fit muscle-man, like the
godlike originator of these courses, Charles Atlas, who was always pictured
posing in rather brief briefs. He was
said to have once been a seven stone weakling whom big bullies on a beach would
humiliate by kicking sand on him as they passed. So
that this would never happen again to him or to other young men he had
developed a body-building system known as Dynamic Tension, which would turn
weaklings into supermen like him.
Feeling pathetic as well as puny I cut out
a request for more information and secretly sent it off. In reply, an envelope with Charles Atlas written
all over it arrived and was seen by my mother, and my shameful interest was exposed. Instead of paying for a course she quite
sensibly bought me a chest expander, which required more strength than I had to
extend its triple metal springs, and if let go, would smite me violently in the
face. I abandoned any hope of being
like Charles Atlas and when on a beach never lay down, in case a bully would
kick sand over me and laugh.
From
the upper slopes of Caerketton and Allermuir there were magnificent panoramic
views of Edinburgh -- the silhouetted Castle, Arthur’s Seat, far-off Fife, the
Forth Bridge, the Firth of Forth and away to the right the open sea. Even further to the left were the distant,
dim blue lower mountains of the western Highlands. From the top of Allermuir, where there was a
cairn and a sense of satisfied achievement, you could see for miles in every
direction and were master, for a while, of all you surveyed.
One trip, that we made by boat in 1950,
was to a small island in the Firth of Forth, Inchcolm, separated from Aberdour
in Fife by a deep-water channel known as Mortimer’s Deep. From the island you had a reverse vista of
the city and the Pentland Hills.
If any place was haunted, this was
it. It had an atmosphere and spoke to
me, but I wasn’t listening then. When I
went there with my sister and her husband, Jim, in the 1990s it made a strong
impression, and even now, as in JM Barrie’s play, Mary Rose, I hear it
calling. Perhaps some ancestral Fraser
lived or died there.
Inchcolm had had a long and violent
history. It was known as the Iona of the East.
Hermits lived there and invading Danes buried their dead there to
prevent their being dug up and eaten by the feral dogs and wolves that roamed
the mainland. King Alexander I founded
an Augustinian monastery on the island which in time became an abbey. It was
raided and plundered several times by seafaring Danes, Scots and the
English. Much still stands of the
ruined abbey, its square tower, cloisters, refectory and chapter house, and a
hermit’s cell. In the 1880s an upright skeleton was found
encased in the abbey’s walls. In both
World Wars the island was fortified, and guns were sited at its eastern end to
protect the Forth
Bridge and the naval base
at Rosyth. The west of the island was
and is guarded by nesting gulls and fulmars, which attack visitors and drive
them off. There is a story to be told here
but it won’t be told by me, not now.
Scotland
and Cornwall are my ancestral homes, and Karachi my actual
home. I feel comfortable in these
places, as I do in unexpected other places, like Ephesus,
the Valley of the Kings and the Scilly
Isles. They have a certain familiarity,
and I feel I should and could be telling stories about them. I devised plots for novels about Ephesus, where Paul preached and where John and Mary lived
and probably died, and about the island
of Samson in the Isles of
Scilly, but I never developed them.
Islands have always had a special
attraction for me. My first two novels
were set on islands, Jersey and Lindisfarne, as was The Edge of Heaven, on Cyprus. Other books, true stories, dealt with
insular and segregated communities, like the police, firemen and the Royal
Navy. And now I live in the biggest
island of all, Australia.
We were at 48 Oxgangs Road for over four years and
the bungalow was the first and only place in which I ever lived that was a
house. The others were all flats. Not only that, our family of four was all
there together.
Down south, in England,
Donny and her husband, Harold, had moved into a cosy but commodious bungalow in
Bournemouth in 1945. This
was Cliff Cottage, built in the grounds of and alongside Dorchester Mansions in
Manor Road. It had a Dutch green-tiled roof and cost
about £5,500. The Barrys moved in during
the summer and were still occupied in furnishing the house when atom bombs
exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Soon thereafter Harold suffered a heart
attack and when he had recovered he became involved with another woman. This distressed Donny so much that she went
off on her own on a coal-carrying cargo-boat to the West Indies and the USA and became
very attached to the ship’s Captain.
She was away for more than three months, which extended to five months
as she then stayed with her mother and Billy Elder, who were now living at
Stevenston in Ayrshire, in a small terrace house at 54 Caledonian Road. Billy was employed as foreman baker.
After
an uneasy reconciliation back in Bournemouth, Donny and Harold sailed to Australia in November 1949 on a six-month trip
that took them to Melbourne, Sydney, Fremantle
and Perth,
where I would settle as a permanent resident in November 1993. On their return to Cliff Cottage in
Bournemouth in April 1950 she deferred her annual visit to Scotland until her brother retired and settled
in Edinburgh in
June.
Since 1946 he had been staying in the Sind
Club in Karachi,
and his early retirement was due to the deterioration in his health, caused by
the climate, by his smoking and drinking, which was inevitably influenced by
the heavy drinkers and smokers who assembled in the Sind Club bar every night –
and perhaps by his wartime experiences. He would be 52 on 23 July.
It was strange seeing him again, and to
have him with us all the time, except when he wandered off to the Hillburn
Roadhouse in the evening or at lunchtime, to socialise with some other
middle-aged drinkers and down some beers.
He seemed smaller – as he was, seen from my much taller
perspective. Otherwise he was
unchanged, and quite lively. His glasses were still a permanent
fixture. His hair had slightly greyed
above his ears, but even when he died he still had a full head of hair and all
his own teeth – a genetic inheritance that may have come from his mother’s Scottish
ancestors, rather than from the Honeycombes, the genetic curse of the
Honeycombes being piles. By this time I
was also wearing glasses, for reading. But
it wasn’t until many years later that I needed glasses to sharpen the images on
film and TV screens.
Soon after my father moved in with us in Oxgangs Road, he
went by train from Edinburgh to Glasgow and thence down to Stevenston to see
his mother. Donny wrote in her
Memories that Mary Elder was overjoyed to see him after his twelve-year absence
in India. He thought she was looking well, and after a
few days, during which they talked a great deal about the past, the present and
his future, he returned to Edinburgh. She came to the station to see him off and
wave goodbye.
In less than a week he was back in
Stevenston – his mother had had a heart attack. He was with her, as was Billy, when she
died, on 4 July 1950. Mary Elder,
former barmaid and wife of Henry Honeycombe and daughter of William Spiers,
fruit merchant, died of a coronary embolism, aged 74.
The day before this, on 3 July, Harold and
Donny had driven up to Wimbledon for the Lawn
Tennis championships and to meet some of their tennis-playing friends. As it was very hot and Harold was suffering,
the following day, the 4th, they curtailed their visit and decided
to lodge overnight at a guesthouse run by an old friend of Donny, Norah, in a
village near Huntingdon. She and Donny
had met in 1928 when both were working, Donny as a receptionist, at the
Burlington Hotel – where she also met and was courted by one of the guests,
Harold Barry. About 11.0 pm on the 3
July, Donny retired to her bedroom and was reading in bed when Harold
entered the room and told her that her mother had died earlier that night. Gordon, in Stevenston, had phoned Cliff
Cottage that afternoon to tell his sister that their mother was very ill, and receiving
no reply had asked the police to contact the All England Club at Wimbledon,
where an urgent message was broadcast (it wouldn’t happen now) at the Centre
Court – which the Barrys had left half an hour before.
After the funeral service Gordon and Donny
stayed on for a few days in Stevenston and then returned to their respective
homes. Billy Elder moved to Prestwick, where he became the manager of a bakery
business owned by a young couple called Carle.
I was indifferent to my grandmother’s
death. As I remember I met her only
once, when my mother and I went down to Stevenston, presumably while we were
staying in Glasgow. The house she lived in was a pokey little
place, in a featureless terrace of working-men’s houses near the station, and
the sitting-room was crammed with furnishings and rather dark. Mary Elder was a composed, short, stout,
elderly woman, with frizzy grey hair and narrow eyes. Her face was well-powdered. It
looked, as my mother said, as if she had dipped it in a bag of flour. Billy Elder was a large, overweight man in a
suit. I didn’t much care for Stevenston
or their home, but was interested in the Indian ornaments that my father had
sent as gifts from India. We had hardly any, my mother having pawned
or sold most of them.
In August 1950 all four of us Honeycombes
had a week-long holiday in the Lake District. We stayed at a hotel in Bowness on Lake Windermere and went for walks and a trip in a launch
on the lake. This took us to Keswick at
the lake’s northern end and I tried to identify Wild
Cat Island,
Cormorant Island and the Amazon, places where
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons had had such enviable adventures. But
these islands were at the southern end of the lake. However, I was able to spot the mouth of the
Amazon. On the way up the lake we passed a 20-year-old
girl, Maureen Picton, who was attempting to swim the 10½ mile length of the
lake. We learned later that she got
within 200 yards of the finish but had to give up because of the cold and her
exhaustion. I don’t think we had very
good weather and spent some time indoors because of the rain. So I never saw the cottage home of Beatrix
Potter, the creator of Pigling Bland and Samuel Whiskers, nor where Wordsworth
had lived.
On
our return, there was an outing, among others, to plain-looking Melville Castle, where we had tea and where in a
field behind the castle were some Highland Cattle to be admired. We always travelled by train or coach. We never had a car. Nor did any of the senior boys at the
Academy have a car, as far as I know.
Nor did I ever acquire one myself, although I learned to drive.
By
this time I had acquired some Scottish attire, and was now an object of female
admiration when kitted out in a kilt of red and black Fraser tartan, a leather
sporran, green jacket, tartan tie, and green stockings with red flashes. All this I wore on special occasions and on
the Sundays when we went to church, to the plain Presbyterian church situated
by the cross-roads at the end of Oxgangs
Road. This
church-going became an irregular event while we lived in Fairmilehead, my
mother believing that it was good for me, though my father preferred to spend
Sunday lunchtime in the Hillburn Roadhouse, and my sister was often away with
her girl-friends. Church-going must have
also revived memories for my mother of Bridge of Allan,
and of her grandfather, Honest John, and it enabled her to meet people, and
participate in the social activities, like garden fetes, that church-goers
enjoyed.
The only thing I enjoyed about church-going
was the singing of hymns. In between
there were prayers and readings from the Bible and announcements about local
events connected with the church. The half-hour-long
sermon was stupefying, and I used to look at the Rev Gillan in his glasses and
black gown, and wonder what qualified him to stand above us in a pulpit and
preach, to literally talk down to us about such unlikely (to me) concepts like
Heaven and Hell and tell us not to refrain from sinning. I had no belief in him or in what he said. Even the Christian symbol of the cross, to
which a man had been nailed, suffered and died, seemed a very strange, barbaric
and bloody object of worship. And what
about all the millions of people who had lived and died before 1 AD? Were they all damned, and if so, why -- not
to mention the millions who followed other religions? It also
didn’t seem right to me to worship a person, or persons. Natural wonders, like mountains, rivers, rocks
and trees, seemed more natural objects of worship, as well as the moon and the sun
and the stars. The worship of idols by other religions, by
Catholics, Jews, Muslims and even Anglicans seemed very strange to me. And did the Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops,
and Bishops really believe that they were going to live for ever, when no
living creature on Earth, not a single species or kind of flora and fauna ever did?
On Sundays we met some of our neighbours,
none of whom was of much interest except for Patricia, Sandra and Charlotte
Bateman, who lived in a house three along from us. They went to St George’s School
in the city, the female equivalent of the Academy. Patricia was older than me, while Sandra was
a year younger. Once or twice I went
over to their house, but from a teenage boy’s point of view they were silly
creatures and only interested in girlish things. Meanwhile, Marion, who was 20 in August
1950, had become interested in the eldest of the two boys who lived next door
to us. His name was Leslie and I
thought him to be a bit of a drip. His
younger brother, Bruce, had a more manly name and was nice-looking and sandy-haired,
but too old, at 18, to be friends with me.
There was no boy of my own age in the neighbourhood.
Our
neighbours on the other side of the garden fence at the rear of our house were
the Rodgers, a retired colonel and his wife, Anne. They had a fine vegetable garden that backed
onto our property, which was lacking not just vegetables but plants. Motivated by their example and a newly
discovered creative urge to grow things, I set about planting seeds in rows in
the wide oblong plot on the other side of the lawn at the rear of our
house. There were errors and failures
and some vegetables were nibbled and eaten by pesky caterpillars and
rabbits. But over the next four years
we had a quite an extensive vegetable garden that produced lettuces,
cauliflowers, carrots, onions, turnips and peas, as well as rhubarb, strawberries,
raspberries, gooseberries. Colourful,
scented sweet-peas arrayed along a wired wall and nasturtiums were persuaded to
climb up the garden fence.
Gardening was an oddly satisfying
occupation – the earthy smell and feel of the soil, the pungent aromas of the
plants and flowers, the tending of them and seeing them grow. But I was never comfortable with worms,
either picking them up or killing them.
I always avoided killing anything if I could.
It was because I was sensitive about
visible death -- by the squashed body of a cat, for instance, run over by a car
in the road -- that I never knew what happened to Ham and Eggy, two golden
hamsters that I acquired when we moved to Oxgangs Road.
The mice I’d had as pets periodically
disappeared -- got rid of, somehow, by my mother. Perhaps she took them back to the pet-shop
off the High Street where they’d been bought.
Ham and Eggy also came from there and lived in the kitchen in a wooden
box, which had two levels and a glass front.
It also had a lid which, when lifted, exposed the hamsters’ upstairs
nest. Ham used to make a delightfully
peeved and chirring noise when aroused from his slumbers and poked. When allowed to run around the sitting-room
with Eggy he used to climb the curtains and, halfway up, fall off. Like a cat he fell on his feet and seemed
none the worse. All this activity
usually fired him into mounting Eggy for a five-second burst of surprisingly
rapid action. This was very misleading
in every way from a human point of view, but educational, I suppose. Then one morning my mother announced that
Ham was dead. She showed me his sad
little curled up corpse and I buried him in a cigarette tin under the
ornamental cherry tree in the front garden.
Eggy, who was larger and more svelte than Ham, must have been traumatised
in some way by his demise. She was
pregnant, and when she gave birth ate some of her babies. I was told this by my mother – unusually,
for she tended not to pass on any bad news and hid magazines with gory
pictures. Eggy and what was left of her
brood then disappeared.
To salve my sorrow I was given a kitten,
part grey tabby, part white, which when a cat, spent a lot of time out of
doors, hunting mice and rabbits, and bodies of mice began to appear on the steps
at the kitchen door. She had a white
chest and nose and lasted a year or so.
And then she too disappeared. In
this case I think she was run over.
Gardening helped to take my mind off these
tragedies, as well as the tragedy of King Lear, and my grandmother’s
death. For in addition to the
vegetables planted at the back, I was engaged in adding colour and flowers to
the front, where the path from the gate to the front door became edged with
mauve aubretia and white alyssum. Small
rhododendron bushes, clumps of lavender, tall colourful lupins and golden rod
filled the empty spaces behind. In the
spring, snowdrops, tulips and daffodils, planted in groups, duly appeared. My sister would occasionally assist me with
the vegetable plot and my father helped out by pushing the lawn mower over our
two lawns, front and back. When it was
warm and sunny, we would have tea on the daisy-covered lawn at the back of the
bungalow, and deck-chairs were purchased so that we could pretend we were on
holiday. At night we now and then
played cards or Mah Jong – when I was on holiday or free from dealing with
school homework. My parents taught me
how to play bridge. And my father,
having bought the necessary brush, soap and a safety-razor, showed me how to shave. I stood beside him in the bathroom as he
demonstrated what to do. It was
probably the first time I had ever been so near him and regarded him so
closely. A few minutes of physical
intimacy that would never happen again
At lunchtime during the week, and on
Saturday, he regularly visited the Hillburn Roadhouse for a few beers or
whiskies. Sometimes he walked there in
the early evening. At the Roadhouse,
which was about half a mile away, he found congenial company in a group of
older, retired men. After a lunchtime
session he would fall asleep in his armchair on the right of the
fireplace. I once took a photo of him
having a siesta and entered it in a photographic competition in a magazine. I
called the photo ‘Beauty Sleep’. It won
a prize and I received a small amount of money.
On birthdays, in August and September – I
was 14 that September -- we had special teas.
Now that we had a house and a garden, more people visited us, like my
sister’s girl-friends, my mother’s women-friends and the favoured members of
her family, like Uncle Alastair and Aunt Jenny, Aunt Ada and Auntie Madge. My mother also still kept in touch with some
of the married couples she’d known in India, as my sister did with some
of her friends. Sometimes a certain resentment
was obliquely shown by those in England
and Scotland who had endured
the bombs and hardships of the war, and directed at those of us who had sat out
the war, safe and well-fed, in India. Though more evident in cities that had been
heavily bombed by German planes, like Glasgow, Liverpool, Coventry, Plymouth,
Southampton and London, this veiled resentment was rarely shown in Edinburgh,
which hadn’t suffered from being bombed, only two bombs having been unloaded on
the city, causing little damage and no deaths.
At some point after my father’s return, a
piano was hired or bought and parked in the sitting-room by the door. My sister was quite a good player, better
than me, although she seldom sat down to rattle off something she knew. My father also played but did so
rarely. When he did, he played without
music some bouncy tune he had learned long ago, and as he played his right hand
would jerk and shake – as mine does now when I brush my teeth.
My mother was now cooking for four
people. But she now had my father to
help her with the housework, and help he did, putting on an apron, doing some
dusting and polishing and running a carpet-sweeper over the floor. I was no help, though co-opted now and then
to wield a dish-towel and dry the cutlery, glasses and dishes. My sister always seemed to be out.
On 20 November 1950 all four of us were
invited to the Rodgers’ bungalow to celebrate their wedding anniversary. My father and the colonel wore DJs, the
women full-length gowns and I my kilt.
At Christmas 1950 there was a family celebration in Number 48, our first
Christmas together as a family since 1945.
Also present were Aunt Ada and Uncle Alastair and Jenny. Crackers were pulled, paper hats were worn, roast
turkey and plum pudding were eaten and a merry time was had by all, I’m sure,
with lots of laughs. For the first
time, since Karachi,
we had a Christmas tree and traditional decorations, like sprigs of holly
draped over pictures and a piece of mistletoe hanging from an overhead light in
the hall. A stocking hung from the end
of my bed overnight on Christmas Eve was found to be stuffed with small gifts
in the morning, such as games and sweets.
There was always an orange at the bottom of the stocking and a Christmas
cracker at the top.
That winter there was more snow than
usual. But this could have been because
we were not in the lower, warmer city and were higher up. Oxgangs
Road ran along a ridge and on its southern side
the land sloped down through fields to the Swanston Burn and then up to the
high hills. I had never seen so much
snow, and it added a romantic aspect to the hills, all now garbed in
white.
It also meant that it was colder where we
were, and when trudging to school on cold dark mornings, to the tram terminus
at the end of Oxgangs Road where the 11,15 and 16 trams turned around, with a
bitter wind blowing and slush underfoot, my extremities froze, despite the
woollen gloves I wore and the woollen scarf round my neck. The
Number 11 tram at the terminus was a bright, warm and welcome sight. It rattled downhill towards the city centre,
three miles away, and I would get off the tram at Morningside and transfer to a
Number 23, which took me, via Tollcross, across the High Street and steeply down
the Mound, and then in an angle across Princes Street and down to Henderson
Row, past the house where my father was born (though I didn’t know that then). The
whole journey took about half an hour.
Playing rugby in the depths of winter, on
rock-hard frozen pitches, added to my loathing of organised games, although the
gathering darkness meant we ended earlier.
It was dark of course when I returned home. When I went to bed it was partially warmed
by a rubberised hot water bottle in a woollen wrap. The extremities of the bed were still like
ice. On some winter mornings when my mother woke me
by switching on the overhead light in my bedroom there was ice on the inside of
the window. She then switched on the
single bar of a small electric fire, and crouching and shivering in front of it
I hastily dressed before downing a breakfast of porridge, bacon and eggs, and a
cup of milky, sugared tea.
Our bungalow had no heating. A coal fire warmed up the sitting-room and
there were electric fires in the bedrooms.
But nothing warmed the bathroom.
It was the coldest place in the bungalow, and every activity there
during the winter was performed by me in double quick time, including stripping
before a bath and drying myself. In
those days I only had a bath once a week.
Meanwhile, at the Academy, I had moved up
another class.
The master in charge of Upper IV was Mr
West, a scraggy and somewhat cynical Irishman from Cork, whose speciality was Mathematics. As my standing in Maths wasn’t good, I was
in an inferior section of the class and was taught Maths by someone else. Paddy West, as my Class Master, only gave me
and the others Scripture lessons. These
were a waste of time, as nothing was learned and no one, as far as I was aware,
was at all religious. For English I
went to Jack Bevan; for History to Mr King, and for Latin and Greek to Mr
MacEwen, otherwise known as Bob Begg.
I also continued with classes in Science and French.
Mr MacEwen once asked six of us, those he
favoured among the brighter boys in the class, to tea at his home in
Murrayfield. His wife served us and
conversation was awkwardly made. After
tea we played written and verbal games, which he supervised. In one, the only one I remember, we had to
guess when a minute was up, counting the seconds silently to ourselves. Harry Usher won that game, the rest of us
under-estimating how slow a minute was.
I later learned that a minute is best counted by adding ‘and’ to the
count, eg, ‘one and, two and, three and,’ etc.
Over the 1950-51 year, although my exam
results were disappointing, I ended the Summer Term third out of the 23 boys in
Upper IV, being placed second in English, sixth in History, fifth in Latin,
second in Greek, fourth in French and fourteenth in Maths. Mr West summed up, ‘He has clearly made a
steady improvement during the session and was much more purposeful at the
end.’ The Rector wrote, ‘Very
promising; I’m particularly glad to see his progress in his weakest
subject. He should do something very
good in the world. My best wishes –
CMES.’
This was the Rector’s valediction. At the end of the Summer Term Mr Seaman left
the Academy to be Headmaster of Bedford School, having been Rector of the Academy
since 1945. More than half of the
masters that I knew had been appointed during his time, although several of
those who had arrived in the 20s and 30s remained – Messrs Hempson, Cooke,
Atkinson, Heath, West, Scott, Read and Munro.
Among the new masters were Mr Hook, Mr Head, Mr McIlwaine, Mr Bevan and
Mr Ford. PDL (Puddle) Ford took over
the school productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and the
Shakespeare plays.
During
Mr Seaman’s rectorship Divisional Music Competitions were instituted, the first
being organised and run in 1951 by the Dux that year, JJ Clyde, and the Head Ephor,
CDL Clark. I must have taken part in
this, in the Carmichael Choir, although I can’t recall what we sang – and if we
won. At the Exhibition, which was the
Academy’s name for the prize-giving and speeches that ended the Summer Term and
the school year, Mr Seaman described the Concert that followed the
Competitions, ‘as the most interesting and musical event’ of his six years at
the Academy. He said, ‘It does seem to
me that when upwards of seventy boys give up their time – and in some cases
very much time – for so good and so musical an enterprise, a very important
process is at work.’ In my last year I
would organise the Music Competitions and the Concert.
I believe that Mr Seaman was instrumental,
in collusion with my mother, in establishing the fact that when I left the
Academy I would be awarded a Close Scholarship to University
College, Oxford.
It had recently been endowed in memory of KD Thompson (EA 1892-1905,
killed in action in 1916), by legacies of £3,000 each from two of his
sisters. Of all these matters I was of
course ignorant at the time.
The new Rector was Mr RC Watt, Rob
Watt. He was the same age as my father
and had served in the First World War.
He came to the Academy from Rugby
School, where he was Head
of the History Department as well as a Housemaster. A Scot and the son of a minister, his
schooling had been at the Royal High School in Edinburgh
and at the Academy’s neighbouring school and rival, Fettes, where he was Head
of the School.
The Summer Term saw the next production of
a G & S operetta, Patience -- in which I did not appear. The main reason was that my voice was
breaking. It was neither alto nor
baritone – nor treble, though I could still manage some painful high
notes. The only part I might have
played was Lady Jane. But that went to
Ian Dewar, who left the Academy soon afterwards. Bunthorne was JJ Clyde. I could have been in the Chorus but was
reluctant to demean myself after starring as Goneril, and I declined the
opportunity of being in the Chorus of Rapturous Maidens. I would have been quite a sight as a
Rapturous Maiden as I was now about 6 feet 3.
This absence from rehearsals and
performances probably improved my position in class, and it also made it more
possible in the Easter holiday for me go on a journey down south.
In March 1951 Donny was in Edinburgh for a few days – she had been staying with Billy
Elder in Prestwick – and paid us a visit. I don’t think she was ever invited to stay
with us. We didn’t have a guest bedroom, and my mother
wouldn’t have relished cooking and housekeeping for this monied and somewhat graciously
condescending visitor. Describing this
visit in her Memories, Donny said she questioned her brother about the reasons
for his retirement. ‘It transpired,’
she wrote, ‘that Gordon had contracted emphysema and a heart condition
aggravated by his wartime service in Salonika and France. This illness and unexpected early retirement
would cause Gordon serious financial problems and this was worrying him
hugely.’
None of this was made known to me. As far as I was concerned my father was
smoking and drinking as much as he had before and was cheerful and quite
active. He once walked with me to Swanston and part of
the way up Allermuir, and of course he was walking every week to and from the
Hillburn Roadhouse.
During Donny’s visit, when I probably played
the piano for her, it was suggested that I might go down to Bournemouth
and stay with her and Harold Barry. The
suggestion might have come from my mother, who was always keen that I should
expand my horizons. Anyway she approved
of the idea and in April off I went.
This was my third visit to England, the first two being the trip to London with the mice, and the holiday in the Lake District. It
was the longest train journey I had ever made on my own, a journey, between
Edinburgh and London, that I would make many, many, many times in later
years. From King’s Cross I found my way
by the London Underground to Waterloo and
entrained for Bournemouth, another journey I
would make off and on for the next 50 years.
At the Central Station I was met by my Aunt
and driven to Cliff Cottage in Manor
Road.
Although it was adjacent to a mansion block, it had a little garden, and
from there I could reach the East
Overcliff Drive that ran along the top of the
sandy cliffs lining the beach and the extensive sweep of the bay below them. On the far right of the bay was Sandbanks
and the entrance to Poole
Harbour. Further
out were the Old Harry Rocks that concealed Swanage and the barely visible
silhouette of Corfe
Castle. On the far left were the hazy white smudges
of the west-facing Needles marking the Isle of Wight. Bournemouth
seemed like a very pleasant place: the sun shone and it was warm. I soaked up the sun sitting on a garden
bench and read a book.
Cliff Cottage was well furnished and had
some antiques, some of which I would eventually inherit. It also had a baby grand piano, and sight
reading from sheets of music, I accompanied Aunt Donny as she sang lush and
sentimental ballads from her repertoire, like Far Away Places, One Night of
Love, Glamorous Night and Some Day My Heart Will Awake, the last two by Ivor
Novello. One day I would devise and
narrate a staged production of his life and music for the Bournemouth Operatic
Society, which was performed twice in the Winter Gardens on a Sunday. It was called Waltz of my Heart.
I
took several photographs of my Aunt in the garden, posing in a satin gown, as
if she were singing on stage. In one
photo she cradled a bunch of daffodils.
I had now begun calling Aunt Donny AD, which she said was better than
being called BC. She wrote about my
two-week visit in her Memories.
‘Ronald,’ she said, ‘was totally different
in temperament from his sister, Marion … [She] was a lively young girl,
uninhibited, full of energy and always ready to chat about whatever happened to
be in her thoughts at the moment.
Ronald, however, was unusually quiet, and gave little indication of his
likes or dislikes. It worried me at
first, but Harold told me to leave him alone and not fuss so much about him … I
soon noticed that Ronald was content to be left alone with a book – or books –
of which he never seemed to tire of reading.
I discovered he was artistic, fond of music and showed an interest in
the theatre; he had taken part in his school’s drama and musical productions and
spoke of them with obvious enjoyment.
This discovery pleased and interested me, for it was something I could
relate to so easily, bringing back memories of my own youthful aspirations … I
enjoyed taking him to the theatre and to the Winter Gardens to hear some
excellent concerts by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Harold, never a talkative man himself,
preferred to take us out in the car, where he could point out places of
interest. We visited the cottage at
Higher Bockhampton, the birthplace of Thomas Hardy, and the Hardy Museum at
Dorchester … We also explored the New Forest and enjoyed some picturesque
drives through Dorset villages and along the coast.’
I’d never read any of the novels of Thomas
Hardy – I began reading them during this visit -- and knew nothing about TE
Lawrence, who had in fact lived in the area.
But I was much enamoured with the verdant sunny countryside and
entranced by the magnificent ruins of Corfe Castle,
perched on a mound in a dip in the Purbeck Hills. Harold, bald-headed and sporting a grey
moustache, was taciturn and gruff and at meal-times AD did most of the
talking. She was now 50 and he was 69,
the oldest man I’d ever met. I was
inhibited by his age and personality and didn’t know what to say to him, and he
didn’t help by saying not much to me. I
was also constrained by showing good manners and by the presence of a
middle-aged home-help and cook, ironically called Louie.
Someone who was much, much older and
consequently became the oldest woman I’d ever met was my Great-Aunt Mem. She was AD’s aunt, Aunt Emma, and was one of
my grandfather Henry Honeycombe’s three sisters. Henry and his family had had little to do
with his sisters since his marriages, although his father, Samuel, twice
visited the Honeycombes in Scotland,
once with Emma, his unmarried daughter.
With Samuel’s death in 1911 and Henry’s death in 1915, all contact
diminished and ceased.
But
it so happened that Auntie Mem came to Bournemouth on a visit before the war,
to be company for a younger married sister, Nellie, who had settled in Bournemouth with her husband, Fred Hoskins. Both of the Hoskins were school-teachers and
they had a son called Eric. Emma became
a frequent visitor, and when Fred and then Nellie died, she stayed on in Bournemouth to keep house for Eric until he married. It was not until 1939 that Emma learned in a
roundabout way that Henry’s daughter, Donny, was also in Bournemouth
and got in touch with her.
Great-Aunt Mem was tiny, about 4 feet 10, aged
88, and quaintly dressed in black. She
wore spectacles and was amazed at my height – nearly 6 feet 4. I was also amazed at her lack of height and
great age, and that she was a Honeycombe.
Born in October 1862, she had been a postmistress at Northfleet in Kent, where her
father, Samuel, the Surveyor and Inspector of Nuisances, had lived. I met her twice on this visit to Bournemouth, and although she told me something of her
father and his family, I made no notes and soon forgot what she had told
me.
There are few things I regret. But now I much regret that although I became
interested in the origins and history of the Cornish Honeycombes in the 1960s,
it was the ancient Honeycombes who interested me then, not what Great-Aunt
Emma, who lived to be over 100, could have told me about my very own Honeycombe
ancestors, about her father, Samuel, who was born in Plymouth in 1828, and
about her grandfather, William, born in Liskeard in Cornwall in 1786. Her recollections of what she knew and had
heard would have covered 150 years, including the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean
war, the Boer War and two world wars, as well as all the social changes of the
Victorian Age and of the first half of the 20th century. But
all this was lost when she died in Dartford in
July 1963, three months before her 101st birthday. If only I had talked to her, tape-recorded
her while she lived!
At the end of the two-week visit, AD came
with me to London, in case I was not sure about
crossing London,
from station to station, and about using the Underground. ‘I needn’t have worried,’ she wrote in
Memories. ‘It was he who studied the
Underground map and led me safely from Waterloo to King’s Cross; he even
decided what would be best for us to eat at lunch, having studied the somewhat
dreary menu at the station Buffet Restaurant.
His confidence and self-assurance quite impressed me, and I felt that
this boy, fast approaching manhood, would soon be making his own decisions, and
mapping out his chosen career with the strength of character and determination
that would achieve success.’
In fact I hardly ever mapped out anything,
nor chose a career. Others made career
choices for me, although some decisions I made on my own.
During the summer holidays there were more
train journeys and travelling. Early in
August 1951 I went down to Eastbourne to stay
with the Maish family and saw Jane and Billy for the last time. Billy
was now 17 and at Taunton
School, where he did his
A Levels in Maths and Physics, played cricket, rugby, hockey and tennis, became
Head Boy and left in 1952. Erskine Abbott was coincidentally also at the
school, though briefly. Billy did his
National Service in the RAF, signing on at the end of his two years for a
commission and permanent employment therein, eventually ending up as an Air
Commodore.
The Maishes lived in a house on Decoy Drive, and
one day, when visiting an amusement arcade on Eastbourne’s
pier, I won some glassware, a jug and two bowls, which I gave to Jane. She still has them. We made car trips to Brighton and to Rye, but the main
excursion, by train, was to the South Bank Exhibition site of the Festival of
Britain. Many British cities, besides London, still showed the ruinous aftermath of
war, rationing still continued amid post-war shortages and general gloom, and
the Festival was dreamed up by the Labour government – the Prime Minister was
Clement Attlee – to encourage positive attitudes and emphasise the nation’s
progress and recovery.
It was a grey day when we were there, and
we wandered about gazing at the thin steel Skylon seemingly floating in the
air, at the metallic fountain, at the Shott Tower,
and wandered through the Dome of Discovery, the Transport Pavilion, the Ship
Pavilion and other examples of British industry and invention. It was all rather ugly. The most attractive buildings were the Lion
and Unicorn Pavilion and the Restaurant.
None of the structures has survived, apart from the Royal Festival
Hall.
Stamps were issued to commemorate the
Festival and I added them to my stamp collection, which I’d started about 1947,
concentrating on British and Commonwealth stamps issued during the reign of
George VI. There were some series of
George V stamps, some British Indian ones, some first-day-of issue envelopes,
and ultimately a mix of foreign stamps with different shapes, bright colours
and designs. I stopped collecting when I left school, where
there was a minor trade in swapping stamps.
The next time I met up with Jane, now Mrs
Whittle-Herbert, was in Perth, Western
Australia, in October 2012, more than 60 years after the Eastbourne visit.
After spending most of her married life in South
Africa, where her mother, Nancy, died, aged 100, Jane and
her husband, Andrew, were now living in Queensland,
on the Gold Coast.
On my return to Scotland I was off again, this time
on a camping weekend with Bill Nicoll and Adrian Carswell -- something I had
never done before, and didn’t want to do again. But I
did. More of that later. Mrs
Nicoll drove us down to the Yarrow
Valley, south of Peebles,
and retrieved us after one night. I had
never slept out of doors, albeit in a tent, nor had I ever cooked anything,
apart from chapathis. Bill Nicoll did the
cooking, frying everything in a pan. We
rambled along the Yarrow Water and climbed a hill. What I remember most is being awoken and
astonished by the noise made by the dawn chorus of birds.
This was followed, in September, by a
week’s holiday in Rothesay, the main town on the Isle of Bute. I went with my parents – Marion must have been off somewhere, possibly
youth-hostelling with one or other of her girl-friends. We stayed in a guest-house on the sea-front
promenade. Street photographers snapped
us wearing or carrying raincoats and although some other photos are sunny, it
seems to have been cloudy most of the time.
These photos show my mother and me feeding pigeons on the main
promenade; a boat-trip on the three-funnel steamer, SS Columba, to Tarbert and
Ardrishaig on the shores of Loch Fyne; a trip around Rothesay Bay in small
motor-boat made by me and my father; and a day-trip on the steamer, Duchess of
Hamilton, past the Isle of Arran to Campbeltown on the lower extremity of
Argyllshire. From there we were driven
to Machrihanish on the other side of the peninsula, from where you could
allegedly see the distant coast of Northern Ireland. On another occasion we had tea at the large
Victorian edifice of the Glenburn Hotel, where Henry Honeycombe and his family
had once stayed and where he had read about the sinking of the Lusitania. We walked along the coast to Ascog, where I
paddled in the icy water looking for interesting shells. Between us and the mainland large ships
sailed to and from the approaches to the River Clyde and Glasgow.
At the guest-house some of the adults
organised a series of party games one night after dinner. In one of them I and a girl called Stella
Moss had to chew on the opposite ends of a piece of string. She was a little bit older than me and was
staying there with her older sister.
Neither of us liked this game, which meant packing the soggy string into
our mouths until our lips met in the middle, while the adults egged us on. We chewed reluctantly but didn’t get close
to each other until one of the men banged our heads and mouths together. It was all very embarrassing. Saliva-soaked string is not a pleasant
prelude to a kiss.
A photograph taken by a street
photographer in Rothesay of my father, mother and myself reminds me that hats
were still being worn by women and men when out of doors. Working-class men wore flat caps and
middle-class men trilby or homburg hats. When on
holiday my father wore a tweed cap.
Bowlers were still being worn by some city businessmen, especially in London, and top hats were
the fashion at weddings and gala events.
Women also wore hats when going to the cinema or theatre, even when in
their seats, and to any social function.
They had their hair permed in those days, wore nylon stockings, fur
wraps and in the winter long fur coats.
My mother did her best to keep up with the latest fashions and was
always smartly dressed.
On 27 September I was 15 and it was back
to school again for the Winter Term of 1951.
I
was now 6 feet 4½ and at this point I fortunately stopped growing. Why I sprouted when I did and then stopped
growing is a mystery to me. But thank
goodness I did. My mother’s brothers
were six feet or so, and I might have shot up to 6 feet 7 or 8, which would
have been far too tall. As it was, I
was now the tallest boy in the school and, as I eventually came to realise, the
tallest Honeycombe in the world.
Not that I was self-conscious about my
height. Indeed I was always mystified when people
referred to me as a ‘giant’ or irritated me by asking if it was ‘cold up
there.’ It wasn’t until I got to Oxford that I encountered anyone taller than
me – two of the students at my college who were 6 feet 5 and 6. I don’t recall even coming across anyone
taller than me during my National Service. However,
whenever I saw another man in the street who was very tall, or stood beside
someone as tall as me, I realised I must after all be very tall, like him. But generally I didn’t, and don’t, think
like that, that I’m very tall, thinking instead that practically everyone I
know is shorter or smaller than me. And
I’m used to that. That’s normal.
Yet when I meet someone who is 6
feet 6 or 7, or more, I revert to being a polite and respectful schoolboy again
– which was the last time, up to the age of 15, when senior boys and masters were
taller than me.
The Class Master of Class V was HR
(Scabby) Scott, who was brusque and militaristic and a golfer. He had a toothbrush moustache. Magnus
Magnusson wrote of him that, ‘He always had an Englishman’s horror of the Edinburgh weather, and
once suggested that the Winter, Spring and Summer Terms should be renamed
Winter I, Winter II and Winter III.’ I
second that. But I was getting used to
the rigours of playing rugby and the freezing cold of Edinburgh winters -- and springs.
Mr Scott took us for French, and Scripture
– though what we were taught in Scripture lessons, whatever it was, was as
usual wasted on me and the other boys. The new Rector, Mr Watt, taught us History,
and rated me as first in his class (‘A promising performance’), as I was in
English. My placing in Latin (‘Fairly
steady improvement’), Greek (‘Steady and competent work’), French (‘Usually
good’) and Science (‘A neat and thorough worker’) remained about the same, and
my worst placing was inevitably Maths, despite some extra tuition. This excited the concern of the new Rector,
who, commenting on what Scabby Scott wrote in his Report at the end of the
Winter Term -- ‘A good report & well
deserved’ -- said, ‘Nor does it reveal all of his talents; but his “steady
progress” in a subject which doesn’t come naturally to him is most creditable.’
They were less forgiving at the end of the
Spring Term of 1952. Mr Scott wrote,
‘He seems to have been taking a bit of an “easy” recently. This must not be extended beyond the
holidays.’ The Rector said, ‘Rapid
growth and the demands of the drama may provide some excuse, but he must revert
soon to his best form if he is ever to reach Scholarship level.’
The drama to which the Rector referred was
Julius Caesar, which was presented in the school hall on 29, 30 and 31 May
1952. I played Brutus.
We now had a proper stage that was built
over the platform used for Prayers and projected further out, as well as having
more width. It was four feet high and
had a painted proscenium arch and wings and two sets of curtains which could be
used for inner scenes. Lighting was
also much improved. WH (Wilf) Hook, who
had directed Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, took a back seat on Julius Caesar,
which was chiefly produced and directed by PDL (Puddle) Ford. Mr Hook had intended to present The Tempest
as the Summer Term production, and in the Winter Term I was tried out and
rehearsed by him as Prospero. But apart
from the fact that he made me feel uneasy, I can’t have been very convincing as
an elderly magician and the idea was abandoned in favour of a play with a big
cast and a historical content, more accessible to schoolboys in every way. Rather than Roman togas, we all wore
Elizabethan costume – cloaks, doublets and hose, flat hats and boots – and neat
Elizabethan moustaches and beards.
Three of the older boys, who had played
leading roles in previous school productions, now played their last. CDL (Chick) Clark
was Cassius; AJC Cochrane (Giuseppe in The Gondoliers) was Octavius; and RM
Greenshields (previously Juliet, and then Inez inThe Gondoliers) was
Caesar. AC (Anton) McLauchlan, who had
been Regan, doubled as Decius Brutus and Titinius; WF (Fergus) Harris
(previously the Duchess of Plaza Toro) was an unathletic Antony, and several stalwarts from the Sixth
and Seventh and the school Fifteens and Elevens filled in the other roles,
doubling as soldiers, servants and citizens.
I was not quite the youngest boy in the cast, as Calpurnia, Portia and
Lucius were played by boys younger than me.
My wife, Portia, spoke clearly but wasn’t very wifely. JWF Learmonth was also much smaller than me
and his real existence as a plain, podgy boy couldn’t be concealed from me by
an Elizabethan head-dress and gown.
Casca was played by DA (Douglas) Cameron,
who would one day become the top announcer in Radio London. JDR (Poker) Morrison was a Citizen, and
others, like JB Neill, JD Crerar and JK Millar I would get to know when I was
in Seventh Modern. Older boys didn’t
alarm me now and I was used to the humiliation, when rugby and cricket teams
were being picked, of being among the last three. Having a heroic leading role in the play
gave me a certain status, even among the sporty types. At the end of the play four of them had to
hoist me onto their shoulders and bear me as the dead Brutus on my back, my
head hanging down between and behind the last two as Antony intoned, ‘This was
the noblest Roman of them all.’ I
rather enjoyed being a serious, noble and honourable Roman and committing
suicide by falling on my sword.
I was an instinctive actor. Having learned the words and thought about
the character I was supposed to be, I spoke the words the way I imagined that
the character might speak, adding extra emphasis and emotion when it seemed,
and felt, right to do so. Unknowingly,
I had a clear speaking voice. Even so,
I was always conscious that what I spoke had to be heard clearly by everyone in
the audience.
It was while we were rehearsing Julius
Caesar that I had what can only be called a vision.
One dark night in February or March I was
sitting at the back of the top deck of a Number 11 tram. No one else was up there as we neared the
Fairmilehead terminus. I was probably
quite tired, having been on my feet for 12 hours, and was mentally drained by
the demands of the rehearsal. Gazing
out of the window at the empty blackness on my left devoid of houses, my
imagination, mind or spirit – what you will – flew out and into that blackness,
into the vast and star-filled darkness of space. It flew on and on, deeper and deeper into the
dark and eternal silence. And I understood that there was nothing and
no one there, no one like us, no God, and I realised that here on Earth we
humans were the only humanoid creatures in the universe, and that we were
alone.
Rehearsals for Julius Caesar began in the
Winter Term and continued once a week during the Spring Term and twice a week
in the Summer Term. On the last weekend
in May the big new stage was erected and dress rehearsals were held on the
evenings before the first performance, which this time was on a Thursday. Lessons and piano lessons had inevitably
suffered in the lengthy period of rehearsal, and over the Easter holiday I decided
not to continue with my piano lessons.
I didn’t have time to practice, nor did I want to take piano exams and
get grades. I had my own piano now at Oxgangs
Road and could enjoy myself, playing whatever I wanted, fortissimo and with
feeling, without being particular about accuracy, and without having to
practice those tiresome interminable scales.
What might also have suffered in the first
half of the year were my preparations for the Ordinary Level of the GCE exam in
July. But in June I studied the
questions in previous exam papers and learned what I hoped would be useful
quotes, and in the end I didn’t do too badly.
In due course I received a certificate saying that Ronald G Honeyconbe
had ‘satisfied the examiners in the following seven subjects of the General
Certificate Examination of the Oxford
and Cambridge Examination Board,’ the subjects being English Language, English
Literature, English History, Latin, Greek, French and Elementary Mathematics.
Despite the play’s rehearsals and then the
performances, at the end of the Summer Term my School report wasn’t too bad
either. The masters seemed satisfied. English … ‘His work is of a very good
standard.’ History … ‘His best is very
good.’ Greek … ‘Neat and sensible
work.’ French … ‘A very useful term’s
work.’ My best subjects were English
and History, and despite some extra tuition in Maths I had sunk to 23rd out of 25
boys. Nonetheless, my Class Master,
Scabby Scott, wrote, ‘An excellent term’s work in all spheres of school
activity,’ – which must have included the School Concert and Divisional
Competitions – and the Rector wrote, ‘I hope he has polished off the Maths
& can concentrate on the work which he enjoys.’
Unknown to me, the Rector and certain
masters must have decided, when the GCE results arrived, that I was a suitable
candidate for Oxford or Cambridge and that a Scholarship might help
to get me there. If I had been heading
for a Scottish university I would have entered the examinations for the
Scottish Leaving Certificate. But now
that I had passed the first stage in qualifying for an English university by
obtaining seven ‘O Levels, I would next do the GCE ‘A’ Level exams. All this meant that I would bypass the Sixth
classes at the school and spend the next three years in Seventh Modern,
preparing for entry into an Oxford or Cambridge college. I was never asked if I had a preference for
a Scottish or an English university, or even if I wanted to attend a university
at all – rather than a drama school. It
was assumed, by my mother and the Academy, that a university education would
follow the one I’d had at school.
Decisions and choices were being made for me that would determine the
directions of much that followed thereafter.
In the meantime, King George VI had died at
Sandringham on 6 February 1952, and Harold Barry had died in Bournemouth
on 20 March. Through a peculiar set of circumstances and
the callous greed of Harold’s son and daughter, AD was left without a home.
After Harold Barry and AD had spent two
weeks on Jersey in the Channel Islands in
October the previous year he had decided that they should live there. AD was reluctant, but the low rate of Income
Tax and no death duties influenced his decision and he made an offer to buy
Chantry Cottage, situated in the parish of St Lawrence, for £10,000, a very high
price for a house in those days. A
deposit was paid and completion would occur when the Barrys arrived in Jersey in March, a few days before moving into the
house. Cliff Cottage was sold,
furniture would be shipped to Jersey on 23
March, and the new owners would take possession on 24 March. Farewell parties and visits preceded the
Barrys’ departure. In the early hours
of 20 March Harold had a heart attack and died.
It
then transpired that according to Jersey law
the purchase of a house was not complete until the final settlement price had
been paid. Moreover, death cancelled
all contracts. As Cliff Cottage had
already been sold, Donny had no home. In Harold’s will she received an annuity of
£800, and she was also given some shares.
His son, Jummie, who lived with another man, informed her that as the
proceeds of the sale of Cliff Cottage would form part of the residue of
Harold’s estate, which went to him and his sister, Joan, this would be divided
between the two of them. All Donny
would have was the annuity and all the furniture and contents of Cliff Cottage.
She was 51, a widow with a small income
and no home. She moved into the
Anglo-Swiss Hotel, which was part-owned by her long-time friend, Doris
Schwyn. But as she couldn’t afford the
higher summer rates of rooms at the hotel she travelled north in June or July
to stay with Billy Elder in Prestwick, not returning to Bournemouth
until September. While in Scotland she visited Edinburgh and friends in Stirling. She had
decided not to contest the will and Jummie’s claims, and he agreed to give her
£1000 as a gesture of goodwill.
Nonetheless, Donny couldn’t afford the costs of living in the
Anglo-Swiss Hotel in Gervis Road
and in November moved, as a paying guest, into the flat of an older friend,
Muriel Gent, who had also recently been widowed. She was there for almost a year.
I was ignorant of most of this at the time,
and for many years afterwards. If
Harold had not died when he did and AD had become in time the owner of Chantry
Cottage, not only would her life have been very different but so, to a lesser but
large degree, would mine. Bournemouth would have dropped out of the picture and she
would not have needed my later financial support.
AD was able to visit us in Edinburgh in the summer of 1952, as it seems
that we didn’t go away on holiday that year.
No doubt there were trips by
train or coach here and there, but I think we were all rather enjoying the
novelty of having a house as a home, a house with a garden, which by now was flourishing.
Marion
had a regular boy-friend, whom she had met at the Plaza dance-hall, where she
used to go dancing accompanied by a girl-friend. In August she was 22. AD described her as ‘a tall and attractive
young woman.’ The boy-friend was Jim
Campbell, aged 28, an engaging, lively man with a great sense of humour. An accountant, he was 6 feet 3 and the son
of an Edinburgh
policeman. During the war he had served
with the RAF as a navigator on Lancaster
bombers, and had not only bombed Dresden and Berlin but
survived. Once he came with us on a
birthday picnic at Swanston (Marion’s
or mine) and in the winter we went sledging down snowy slopes.
The following year he proposed to her, and
asked my father’s permission to marry his only daughter. My mother thought Marion might have done better than marry an
accountant, the son of a policeman. She
had hoped that her talented and attractive daughter, who had had a good
education, and could play the piano, paint, sing, sew and cook, would marry a
doctor, a lawyer, or some nice young man from a good middle-class family. Marion
was on tenterhooks when Jim was closeted with her father in the
sitting-room. I had no idea what was
going on, and when I entered the sitting-room later was taken aback to see them
kissing in the middle of the room. I
had only seen this happen in films, not in real life.
Film-going was a weekly event in those
years at Oxgangs Road. There were quite a few cinemas in Edinburgh, of various
sizes and with various interiors. One
had a cinema organ that rose out the pit in front of the screen. Most showed newsreels and most had
usherettes who paraded up the aisles during intervals selling ice-creams in
tubs and orange squash. Most played the
National Anthem at the end of the last screening of a film. We were supposed to stand for this, and
did. But some people didn’t. I began
to avoid this antiquated custom by speeding out of the cinema as soon as the
film ended and before the National Anthem began. But I had to be quick. If caught by the crashing opening chords I
dutifully came to a halt in the aisle, turned round and embarrassedly faced the
screen, on which a colour film of the Queen at Trooping the Colour was shown.
My mother liked going with me to the
pictures (as they were called then). It
was one of the few times she could have me to herself. Once when I announced I was going out to see
a certain film she said she would also like to see it. I indicated, firmly, that I wanted to see it
on my own, and she wailed, ‘But I want to go!’ and almost wept. That
was embarrassing, but one of the reasons I wasn’t pleased to have her with me
was that her presence was distracting and drew attention to me -- apart from
the fact that it wasn’t normal for a teenage boy to go to the pictures with his
mother and be seen with her. She
dressed up for the cinema, as she did for any outdoor excursion, and inevitably
drew attention to herself, and therefore to me, by the way she was made up and
dressed and because she talked to people.
She always wore a hat, as virtually every woman did when at a cinema and
a theatre, and these hats were generally quite high and showy. But at least she didn’t smoke. She once embarrassed me at the conclusion of
the playing of a violin concerto in a film called Rhapsody, starring Elizabeth
Taylor, by vigorously applauding.
People looked around to see who was clapping with such fervour. I could have died.
Films set in ancient Rome were popular then, films like Fabiola
and Quo Vadis, both of which were released in 1951. Death of a Salesman, which I saw in 1952,
made a lasting impression on me for other reasons, mainly because it was about
a son’s relationship, or lack of it, with his father, and because the son
looked and sounded, as I thought, just like me. Kevin McCarthy was the son, Biff Loman, and
Fredric March the father. Although
McCarthy was 37 when the film was made I totally identified with him – he
looked like me -- and was quite shaken by the passionate frustration he felt
about his father. I next saw McCarthy
in his most well-known film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
A puritanical disapproval of my father’s
drinking was my main area of dissatisfaction.
Sometimes he drank too much during his sessions at the Hillburn
Roadhouse and staggered home. One night
he couldn’t find his front door key and had to ring the bell. I opened the door and there he was, swaying
and smiling apologetically, with blood on his face. He had fallen down and cut himself. I was disgusted. He never, however, became disgustingly or
aggressively drunk, and was more tipsy and merry than a menace, and I rarely
saw him fully inebriated, as my mother used to hide him away in their bedroom –
as she hid everything from me that I was not supposed to see or know.
I exploited this once or twice – I wasn’t
always disapproving – by hiding under his bed when he was in the bathroom and
when he clambered into his bed (they had single beds) I slowly began to pull
the bedcover off him, with the blanket and the sheets, from below. In his fuddled state he couldn’t work out
why the bedclothes were sliding off him and accused my mother of being
frisky. She, in her bed, was having
hysterics, trying to stifle her laughter.
When I was a child in India he used
to tell me a story about Johnny and his Cherries. It was a sad story and much affected me, and
it apparently used to reduce me to tears.
What it was about I can’t remember, but it was probably based on a
sentimental Victorian tale and may have been told or read to him by his mother.
I
recall that in Edinburgh
he divulged, to my surprise, the punning titles of two imagined books – Pools
of Water, by IP Squint, and Noises in the Night, by Wee Tin Po(t). He
seemed to like puns. In Karachi Orlo Bond was
used to repeat what my father once happily said – ‘There’s nothing like a roll
with Honey!” I recall a saucy story he
told about an abbot in a monastery, who lined up the monks and, to test their
devotion to celibacy and non-interest in females, had little bells tied to
their penises and then showed them pictures of naked women. All the bells remained motionless and
silent, apart from one attached to a young monk’s willie. It jangled and jerked so vigorously that it
fell off his willie, and when he bent down to pick it up all the other bells began
to ring. I imagine this was something
he heard from one of his cronies in the Roadhouse.
My father was actually a very nice, kind
man, good-humoured, pleasant and affable.
Family occasions, like birthdays
and Christmas, and the occasional outing, were enjoyable and enjoyed by
all. After he returned to Edinburgh the four of us
went every year to the pantomime at the King’s Theatre. We went on Boxing Day and had seats in the Upper Circle. Scottish masters of comedy, like Jimmy Logan
and Stanley Baxter, played the Dame.
The pantomimes were a wonderful mix of comedy, colour costumes and
settings, drama and song. Almost 40
years later I would twice appear in pantomimes myself.
One night something happened which I can’t
explain. I was doing my homework, studying or writing
something on my knees while perched on the sofa opposite the fireplace. My mother was in an easy chair on my left,
knitting or sewing, and my father was in his chair on my right. He seemed to be dozing but must have been
watching me, or perhaps he suddenly woke up and saw me, in profile, engrossed
in what I was doing. And he said, bemusedly,
‘Why are you so beautiful?’
I was taken aback, and mystified. My mother made some dismissive but humorous
comment, and we resumed what we were doing as if nothing at all had been
said. But I remembered, and have
wondered now and then what prompted his remark.
Photographs of him as a young man show
that he was more than handsome. With
his regular features, straight nose, generous mouth and fine blue eyes, he was
beautiful in his way. Perhaps he saw
something of himself in me -- as he used to be. I also think I amazed him because I was so
tall, so self-absorbed, so talented, and a complete mystery to him -- he had
fathered a monster. Apart from calling
me ‘Ronald boy,’ there were no words or displays of affection. My mother was the dominant presence in the
family, and although he was present and part of my life, I remember next to
nothing of what he said and did. He was
just there. I remember the four of us
going to the pantomimes and on holidays and outings, but I have no recollection
of him attending any of the productions in which I appeared at the Academy, nor
what he said about them or me.
He was not as convinced as my mother was
about me having a full education.
Paying for it was costly (about £200 a term) and his income could hardly
afford it. He thought that I should leave school, as he
had done when he was 16, and begin to earn a living. My mother was of course totally opposed to
this, and it was my father who got a job – as a salesman selling
encyclopaedias. This didn’t last for
very long. He must have felt demeaned
by it, knocking on doors and being told to go away.
And so I continued my schooling at the
Academy, after which a university education had been mapped out for me at
either Oxford or Cambridge, although there were times when it seemed to my
masters, and the Rector, as if I wouldn’t make it to either place. Not that I cared one way or the other. I couldn’t think that far ahead. Nonetheless, entering Seventh Modern at the
start of the Winter Term of 1952 seemed a significant and important move, even
to me.
I was now 16. Having survived my first six years at the
Academy and established a reputation of a sort, which increased my confidence,
I was able to relish the greater freedom of being in Seventh Modern, which
included those boys studying English, History, Latin, French and German with
universities in view. There was also a
Seventh Science and Maths, and a Seventh Classics, ie, Latin and Greek. Seventh Classics was in a wing of the
Library and was entered by a door beside a covered area where school notices
were posted, notices about sporting activities, play rehearsals, CCF events,
team and other promotions, and rules and regulations. I was once listed, to my dismay, in a Third
Fifteen team scheduled to play rugby against a similar third-rate side from
George Watson’s, at their ground. I
trotted about the muddy field for the length of a lack-lustre game, avoiding
the ball and the other side, and I noticed I was not alone in doing so.
The classes of the Seventh were occupied
by boys aiming for scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge colleges or
expected to gain entry through passing Common Entrance examinations. Boys in the Sixth were heading for Scottish
universities or for further education elsewhere or jobs in the services, the
law or business worlds. I was destined,
without being fully aware of this, to take my ‘A’ Level exams the following
summer, and was being prepared in Seventh Modern for a degree in English or
History at either Oxford or Cambridge.
The Class Master was WH (Wilf) Hook, who taught English. He was
backed up by JH (Jack) Bevan. History
was taught by the Rector, RC (Rob) Watt and by Dr DGD Isaac. There were also occasional classes in French
and Latin, and a Scripture lesson continued to be suffered by the Rector and
some of us once a week.
Seventh Modern met at the far end of the
Inner Library at two tables pushed together and overlooking the Yards. Here ten of us had our classes in English,
History and Scripture. The master
teaching us sat at one end. For classes
in Latin, French and German we went elsewhere.
We were a very mixed bag. I was
the youngest, having only become 16 in September. Billy Balfour was a senior ephor and in the
First Fifteen; Molly Miller, our only House-boy, was in the First Fifteen and
the First Eleven; Tommy Baxendine was in the Second Fifteen and a sergeant in
the CCF; Marr was the CCF’s CSM. Mick Harvey, sparky, small and
dark, was captain of the Second Fifteen, a sergeant in the CCF and habitually
won prizes, including English ones. Then
there was Fergus Harris, JD (Ego or James) Crerar, Anthony (Anton) McLauchlan,
who was in the RAF section of the CCF and in the Shooting Eight (he shot at
Bisley), John Gordon, a rugby-playing hearty, and myself. Half of them would leave the Academy the
following year and be replaced by some other university-bound boys.
As there were fewer of us now doing
English and History the classes were more like tutorials. There was theoretically more give and take,
more question and answer, more conversational exchanges. In this I didn’t excel, for if I had nothing
to say or wasn’t interested, or had insufficient knowledge, I said nothing at
all. If we were ever invited to the
Rector’s home for tea, as happened later on, and were supposed to take part in
a debate or discussion, I was silent throughout, partly because I didn’t want
to display my ignorance or say something stupid. This
was a trait that continued into my days at ITN, where at production meetings I
contributed nothing whatever, as the others there were more expert and
knowledgeable than me. I was only
there, as far as I was concerned, to read the news – which meant putting it
across with clarity and some expression (as if I was telling a story) but
without knowing much more than what was on the script. We had correspondents and reporters to
interpret national and international events and explain.
At the end of the Winter Term, Dr Isaac
reported, ‘While his narrative essays give evidence of a willingness to read,
his answers to scholarship-type questions as yet show little fluency in the
construction of argument.’ Wilf Hook
wrote of my English work, ‘His essays are limited by some immaturity, and show
a more developed capacity for feeling than for thought.’ In his Class Master’s report he said, ‘The
jump from V to VII has not been too much for him … He should encourage himself
to be more forthcoming on paper and in class (this latter particularly), for
his thoughts, though doubtless deep, would gain in flexibility through
exercise.’
It was during this term that I wrote my
Ode to the Seventh Modern, which was inspired by the fact that we were reading
and studying Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.
The Ode, which is dated 26 November 1952, was
a spoof or imitation of the Prologue, and after the ten characters in Seventh
Modern were described, I intended to get each of the ten to tell stories, as
they did in Chaucer’s Tales. Although I
started on one tale, I soon abandoned it, as my interest in the project and its
versification was diverted by other subjects and verse forms. The Ode was well received, even by the
satirised ten. It began:
‘When November with shiny blast and chill
Has freezed the autumn leaves of holt and
hill;
When clammy mists invade the smoky town,
Which now for smoky winter settles down
And ever colder greyness blurs the sun,
Then time is slow, and sleepy lessons
done,
The sluggish schoolboy crawls around the
Yards,
Depressed by fog which chokes and him
retards,
At Break, to peer at lists and notices
Of Corps – what toil – and Rugger
practices;
Or scuffles shouting at his merry game
Of footer, fives, or something much the
same.
It so befell that on one murky day,
I chanced in sloth in Library to stray …
And having naught to do and feeling wise,
And full of joie de vivre and entreprise,
I undertook this work of worthy note;
For so I think and you, I hope, will vote.’
In one free period – and we had free
periods in Seventh Modern – I read the finished poem to the assembled class,
without complaint, and Wilf Hook, given a copy, indicated his approval by
reading selected excerpts from it to other classes, without mentioning the
characters’ names, and asking his audience to guess who was being described.
Fergus Harris, I said, used to ‘colour red
in laughing joke’ and when he laughed he ‘rubbed his hands … On every master’s
words he hung with yearning, and gazèd deep for knowledge in his face.’ AC (Anton) McLauchlan, I said, was ‘sweetly
dressed in tailored clothes of pastel colours stressed’ and he had careful wavy
hair, squarely arched eyebrows and thick lips ‘through which his voice, as
treacle smoothly slips from off a spoon, did issue sugared rich.’ JW (John) Gordon’s face was effused with a
‘ruddy healthy glow’ and ‘his eyebrows crossed down low.’ ‘Hysterical he laughed and heartily,’ I
said, and ‘Prodigious length of essays long he wrote by scrawling fast, which
left me far remote.’ Of myself I said
that ‘It shamed him sore to hear of all things vile, or bullying or anything
impure; a gentle soul he had, of that I’m sure.’ I went on, ‘Singing he was or humming all
the year with varying key – a pain it was to hear,’ and ‘He worked not hard,
but which, he should, of course; his English essays were of subtle force …
Still he survived and got on best he could.’
In December 1952, my creative energies
were directed towards a new and different venture, the making of a record. I don’t recall whose idea it was, but Marion and I recorded two songs on a small disc -- I
played the piano, an upright -- in a cramped studio somewhere in Edinburgh and sent the
result to AD, who was still in Muriel Gent’s flat.
In the third volume of her Memories AD
wrote, ‘On Christmas Eve … a parcel addressed to me was delivered by post, and
when I opened it I found it contained a gramophone record. I couldn’t imagine what it could be, and
asked Muriel if she would play it for me on her radiogram … To my astonishment
and delighted surprise I heard a voice, “Hello, Auntie Donny! This is Marion and Ronald talking to you
from Edinburgh.” Marion
said they thought it might please me more this Christmas to have a record from
them rather than the usual greetings card.
They had rehearsed two musical items, she said, which they hoped I would
enjoy. Then followed a short duet from The Mikado,
sung by Marion and Ronald … This in turn was followed by Marion singing “Oh, for
the wings of a dove,” The record ended
with a cheerful ‘Happy Christmas, Auntie Donny!” ’ She
continued, ‘In my loneliness and general unhappiness the very thought that I
had not been forgotten by the two young people most dear to me was too much for
my pent-up emotions. My eyes filled
with tears and I wept.’
The song from The Mikado was the one in
Act II that followed the entrance of the Mikado and Katisha – ‘From every kind
of man obedience I expect.’ This tells
me that I had already been cast as the Mikado in the Academy’s next production
of a G & S operetta and had begun rehearsing the songs he would sing. This might also partly explain why, at the
end of the Spring Term of 1953, the masters’ reports were more impatient.
Dr Isaac (History) wrote, ‘His essays are
dull and uninspired. He does not sparkle
in argument, nor is his reading particularly deep.’ Jack Bevan (English) wrote, ‘He is not
showing the qualities of a scholar which I hoped to expect from him.’ And Wilf Hook wrote, ‘The reserve of his
character is rather overdone and he must commit himself more fully in his
essays, which suffer from brevity and some impatience.’ The Rector commented, ‘I know he has talents
& interests outside the subjects here mentioned, but if his ambition is to
attain scholarship he must give more of himself to the work it involves … He is
expressive on the stage, but, in propria persona, too reticent.’
I expressed myself in another poem at the
end of the Spring Term. Entitled Lament on the Second Last Day of Term, it had
five stanzas of hyperbolic reaction to the fact that Jack Bevan had given us
some extra work. The third stanza said:
‘The day before the holidays,
So much of torture was his craze,
He smashed each schoolboy’s
soothing dream –
“On Liberty” – oh, what a theme!
By Mill, that tiresome, verbose
drudge,
Whose work is thick and dark as
fudge;
You may, I say,
Make screaming cries:
That book he set – to summarise!’
This poem was not presented to Jack Bevan,
although it might well have amused him.
He was a boyish, enthusiastic master, with pink-rimmed eyes, and when he
addressed us he leaned forward, clasping his hands. Newly arrived at the Academy, in 1949, he
had played rugby for Oxford
University and he coached
the First Fifteen at the school. Wilf
Hook, who had arrived in 1947, used to sit in his chair, hunched and with his
legs crossed. His hands were like paws,
an aspect of them rendered sinister by the black hairs on his knuckles. He tended to look at us sideways, almost
slyly, and had a choking, wheezy laugh.
Dr Isaac was a stocky, heavily built and energetic Welshman. He
wore glasses with thick rims and spoke through his nose. He also coached rugby at the school. The Rector had bristly eyebrows and bristly
grey hair and generally stood when talking to us, peering at the floor. When he asked a question, abruptly, he used
to stare at us with a penetrating big-blue-eyed gaze, as if he were a bird of
prey. All the masters wore full-length
black academic gowns and when proceeding to and from classes carried books and
files under an arm or in a brief-case. In
Seventh Modern I was intimidated by the proximity of these older, erudite men,
and in their presence was never relaxed.
During the Easter holidays I travelled
with a school party, led by a couple of masters, one of whom was Mr Head, to
Lugano and Venice. We
travelled by train and boat. This
two-week trip, my first in Europe, was paid
for by AD.
What happened was that my mother wrote to
AD telling her about the proposed school trip.
She very likely hinted that my father couldn’t afford the cost. AD wrote to the Rector asking for details
and whether he thought I would benefit from such a trip. He replied that I was a good pupil, likely
to succeed in whatever career I chose, and would benefit in many ways from such
a holiday. She then wrote to me,
telling me she wanted me to go on the trip and I replied with an unctuous,
formal letter of gratitude on 3 February.
I told her there would be about 40 boys in
the party, and although only one was from the Seventh (Bill Nicoll) there were
many of my own age from the Sixths. I continued, ‘The majority of us are going
down to London
by the night-train on Tuesday 7th, arriving very early on Wednesday
morning. As the boat train doesn’t
leave until about twelve, we will be let loose upon London … I have promised to
show Nicoll the sights – he has not been to London before – going the rounds by
Tube, which is quite easy to follow … At the moment, I have just started
rehearsing “The Mikado”, and it is quite different from the rehearsals for
“Julius Caesar”. We only spent an hour
today rehearsing, while as Brutus I used to stay three hours; also, the
producer, Mr Hempson, is not so commanding as the former producer.’ I then said I’d seen films like The Sound
Barrier and Limelight, which starred Charlie Chaplin and Claire Bloom, and was
going to see Quo Vadis … ‘The weather here has been much colder since the gales
of Saturday. At the end of the road a
fence was blown down and a tree uprooted … I remain your affectionate nephew,
Ronald.’
I wrote several letters to AD about the
trip. My parents, and Marion and Jim,
only received postcards, most of which were written on Thursday 9 April, 1953. Taken together, what follows, in part, is
what I wrote to them all.
‘We reached London at 6.27 and spent most of the day
sitting on suitcases and in restaurants.
The crossing Folkestone-Calais was hazy and quite calm: we spent more
time at the English Customs than with the French. We reached Basle at 5.0 am after an eleven
hour journey across France
in the continental Express. The seats
were narrow and not very comfortable and people kept passing through our small
compartment – divided by a corridor. We
passed three factories ruined by war damage and noticed the absence of
hedges. We arrived here [Lugano] at 2.5
pm after having a glorious steamer trip across Lake Lucerne
… It was misty and drizzly when we arrived and we wandered about looking for a
Post Office. A meal is to be served at
6.30. Am writing this on my bed at 4.55
in our Hotel, which is situated in a sort of side street behind the buildings
bordering the Lake … There are four of us in the one room, which has very heavy
old-fashioned furniture; 2 single beds and a tremendous four-poster type of
double bed, in which we intend to take turns in sleeping. The other bed occupants are Martin, Anderson
and Carswell.’
These three, and Bill Nicoll, were among
the school oddballs with whom I generally associated, those who wore glasses,
like Martin and Anderson, and those who were inept at games. I also began wearing glasses for reading
about this time. Adrian Carswell was a
bit girly, but a fast runner, a nifty tennis player and a competent pianist.
I continued, ‘We have two balconies looking
onto the road … We are all worn out with the two days travelling, mostly by
night, and some boys have gone to bed already having bathed, which costs 2
francs … We have a stuffed eiderdown as sheets. Most things are quite expensive except the
necessities and cigarettes, cameras and cuckoo-clocks. You don’t really need to know Italian – the
girl in a camera shop spoke fluent English.’
All the postcards ended ‘Love Ronald.’
AD was showered with more detail. Writing from the Hotel Condor Rigi, Lugano, Switzerland
on 10 April I said, ‘This morning it was raining, but nevertheless we went
another round of the town finding out things.
The rain had stopped by lunch so we took a 2fr 60 funicular ride to the
top of Mt San Salvatore … Yesterday coming from Basle to Lucerne we passed through all the cherry tree
country which was in full bloom. The
pack lunches, stations and trains are much cleaner than ours. We sailed from Lucerne to Fluelen from 9 – 1130 about,
stopping at all the little harbours. The sun was shining and everything seemed
fresh and attractive … The mountains with snow on the top reared up all
around. From Fluelen to Lugano we kept
passing through all the tunnels … The scenery was terrific … From Calais to
Basle we took eleven hours in a sleeperless compartment, most uncomfortable …
In London when we arrived at 6.20 we hung around most of the while till 11.50,
sitting in ABC restaurants or waiting in the station. We were allowed to walk in a party for a
short while: Tube to Westminster then walked up to Trafalgar Square via
Whitehall, then on to Piccadilly … The stands for the Coronation were going up
and there were not many people around … On Monday we are going on a tour to St
Moritz.’
On
Monday, 13 April, I wrote, ‘I am writing in the Lounge in the Roof Garden – it
is raining outside. The Hotel as I
think I said is five stories high plus the two halves of the Roof Garden … Here
people read, write and play Bridge or Canasta, which we play every night … On
Saturday night we four who share a bedroom went rowing on the Lake – two in
each boat. The sun was shining
brilliantly and we were out for and hour and a quarter. Anderson and I should have been out for just
an hour, but we went so far and he kept rowing in circles. A
steamer was coming in to the pier near our boating station just as Anderson was rowing us
in. He kept going the wrong way but we
got clear. The promenade is lined with
chestnut trees with their tops cut off to enable the houses behind to see over:
here and there are tall cypress-looking trees and other shrubs are scattered
over the grass, along with magnolia bushes in full bloom, japonica, eucalyptus
trees and flowers.’ I also referred to
the ‘blue lilacs’ which is what I called the mauve hanging clusters of the
climbing wisteria trees. They in fact
impressed me the most.
In the afternoon we went by steamer to
Morcote. ‘Going down the Lake we passed
under the bridge which divides the Lake in two and which made the steamer lower
its funnel … Morcote itself is a lovely lakeside village. It straggles up the hills in the rear, and
we puffed our way up thousands of steps to see the Church which has a restful
atmosphere – the whole village is very peaceful – something like San Michele of
the book of the same name … It was very hot … Lots of lizards, small ones, ran
around the rocks.’ We inspected a
cemetery and an artist’s studio and wandered about. I
wrote, ‘There was nobody about, in fact most towns seem to have no people in
them and very few cats and dogs. At the
pier we bought ices of five colours, and cherries, nuts, etc, shaped like a
slice of cake – it was very good and called Cassata.’
Cassata was a revelation – I loved it –
not to mention the Swiss and Italian meals we had, which were so different from
the Windsor soup,
mince and rice, semolina and sago puddings served at school, and the prevalence
of bacon and eggs and roast beef and vegetables at home.
I continued, ‘On Sunday we were woken at
7.30 by the church bells. The sun was not shining but it was a nice
morning. We bedroom four went for a
walk in the park. It is not very big,
but the flowers were blossoming, and it seemed proper to sit in the park on a
Sunday. There was an artist painting
and fish swimming in the Lake … We had been told to be enterprising, so we four
booked a coach tour to Monte Lema … The tour, which left at 2.0, cost 10
francs. It was hair-raising in parts,
for we had to go up and down three valley sides with terribly steep hair-pin
bends … up to Miglieglia. There we got
a chair-lift to the top of Monte Lema 5328 ft.
It took almost 18 minutes going almost straight up and was colder when
we reached the top. The view would have been magnificent, but
there was a strong heat haze and thick clouds covered the sun. Snow was lying around in patches, and having
looked over to Lake Maggiore shining red in the sun, we walked into Italy – the
boundary runs along the top of the mountain.
Two frontier guards chatted nearby.
Going down was more scaring but you get accustomed to it and there is
certainly a thrill in the whole thing … The tour took four hours.’
There were dramas. ‘Yesterday Anderson leaned against one of our balcony
windows and the thing crashed onto his bed.
The landlady was a bit peeved as already some people had left because of
the noise some of our drinking and smoking boys made in the night, though we
never heard it.’ And then on the Monday
Adrian Carswell had his money stolen.
‘He had left his wallet for a moment in the Post Office and some woman
had apparently stolen the money and returned the wallet minus all his Italian
money and the remains of his Swiss francs.
So far he has not been told
anything by the Police. He had been
crying and was sitting in silence.’
On the morning of Monday, 13 April, we
were woken at 6.30 by one of the masters for a four-hour coach trip to St Moritz. The coach took us on a dull and cloudy day
through rock tunnels along Lake Como and in and out of Switzerland
and Italy.
Each time our passports had to be
stamped. Mist hid the mountains for
most of the journey, but at St Moritz
the weather cleared. I wrote, ‘The
Lake was covered with ice except for a thin rim round the edge and a cold wind
blew. But the town was dead. I saw three black cats, three dogs,
children, about ten adults, two moving cars in the whole town plus our own
party and tourists. Most of the hotels
were all shuttered and the shops closed.’
On the Tuesday it rained all day and I
played Canasta, or talked with the others.
In the evening I went with Anderson to
the Super Cinema to see an American film, Lydia Bailey, with French and German
sub-titles, about a negro revolt in Haiti in Napoleon’s time. The film was interrupted by an unexpected
interval. The next day there was a
coach tour to Como,
which I thought was ‘rather dirty.’
Back in Lugano, Nicoll, Gracie and I visited a small zoo, which
contained ‘a bear, which we gave an apple to, a leopard, a lion, a lioness and
two cubs, two seals, snakes and assorted birds and smaller animals.’ From Lugano we entrained for Venice.
Reading these letters now it all comes
back to me. I notice that even then I
was precise about names, numbers and dates.
My last letter in this sequence is dated Sunday, 19 April. We
were now in Venice. I wrote after lunch sitting in a chair on
the terrace of the gabled, three-storied Villa Laguna, on the lagoon side of
the Lido and facing the distant outline of Venice itself. I shared a room on the first floor with RM
Martin. The room faced the street where
single-decker trolley buses occasionally passed by. There was a shortage of hot water and the
meals were sparse. They were
supplemented by intakes of another delicious cassata-like ice-cream called
Torta-Tita.
I thought Venice was magical and full of wonders,
architectural and artistic. I wrote that it was ‘a fascinating city, full
of heat, colour and smells, not one of them odious. The back streets, which you can easily lose
your way in, are very narrow and always interesting. Although the houses appear dingy, the people
are for the most part well-dressed … The centre of the city is the Piazza of S.
Marco where hundreds of pigeons and people flock together. Men accost you trying to sell their wares
and café music comes across the chatter.
For the last three mornings the Piazza has been the centre of our
excursions, which we reach by water bus.
In the afternoon we explore the Lido
and the huge stretch of beach on the other side of the island. At the moment parts are being dug up for the
summer season.’
On those excursions we visited the
glass-making island, Murano, and viewed the city’s ancient churches containing
some of the finest paintings by Italian artists that I had ever seen. But little did I know at the time of its
extraordinary history and its glamorous connections with the English
aristocracy, with writers and poets. As
if in acknowledgement of this immersion in art and my own interest in it, I
took to wearing a black beret. And no
doubt as a former Contadine I periodically sang extracts from The Gondoliers
and performed a modified cachuca in St Mark’s Square.
I was back in Oxgangs Road on Tuesday, 28 April, when I
wrote an oily bread-and-butter letter of thanks to AD. I told her about my preparations for the
previous Thursday’s train journey from Venice to
Basle, for which we had to provide our own
sustenance. I said I went shopping with
Gracie and bought ‘11 bananas, 6 apples and 5 oranges, 3 cherry cake things and
4 orange sweet tubes.’ I also had my
last taste sensation of Italian ice-cream.
After supper at the hotel ‘when I managed to snaffle two rolls for the journey,’
Martin and I went upstairs to pack. I
stuffed all the fruit and food into a basket, along with a pair of shoes, a
jacket, and a glass horse I bought at Murano.
Other glass animals were protected in my suitcase by piles of dirty
handkerchiefs, shirts and ties – and underwear I expect – and an ironwork
ornament of Swiss cow-bells, which would be hung at the front door of Number
48, and a cuckoo-clock, which became a wedding present for my sister and Jim
and kept time all their married life.
Into my raincoat’s pockets I crammed brochures, pamphlets, books and my
washing-bag. We were in our beds about
8.45.
Breakfast was at 6.15, and laden with
luggage the school group travelled through a sunny Venice on a waterbus to the station. An American cruiser anchored off St Mark’s
Square had been joined by a destroyer.
Our train left soon after 8.0 am.
As before, all the school’s compartments were reserved. We changed trains at Milan,
where we transferred to an electric train that took us across Switzerland, reaching Basle
at 9.30 pm. On the way I had an
accident. I was looking out of the open
window at the view, leaning my elbows on it, and when I drew my head in the
window jerked up and hit me under my jaw.
I was momentarily stunned and my lips, bitten in the blow, began to
bleed. But I was able to eat a full and
lengthy meal at the Hotel Bristol in Basle
opposite the station. Passing through
French Customs, we boarded another train which left Basle
after midnight.
Sleeping was difficult, although the seven
in our compartment yielded the extra seat to me ‘because I was so long.’ Calais was
reached about 11.0 and so, via Customs, it was onto a steamer for the Channel
crossing, and then a train from Folkestone took us to London, where we arrived about 4.05. On the way we played cards and finished the food
I had purchased in Venice. This time we had sleeping berths on the
overnight train to Edinburgh
from King’s Cross. Our luggage was
dumped there and the Lugano Four headed via the Underground to Leicester Square to
see Richard Burton in a war film, The Desert Rats. A
meal was scoffed in Cambridge Circus, where I noted that a new show, The
Glorious Days, starring Anna Neagle, was being staged.
My last long letter to AD ended, ‘I slept
this time going up in the night train and it was about 5.30 when we started
getting up. We watched the mists clear
away across the fields of Scotland,
and the morning sun rose in a clear sky.
We reached Edinburgh
at 6.55. I got a tram to myself all the
way home where Mummy was up.’
Travel educates the mind apart from
broadening it – the different languages, scenery, cultures, towns and food –
and I learned more from that two-week journey than I ever learned from John
Stuart Mill.
Back at the Academy for the start of the
Spring Term I was plunged into the increasing pace and complexity of the
rehearsals for The Mikado, directed by Mr Hempson, assisted by Puddle Ford, who
also designed and painted the scenery.
While this was happening, I sang in the School Concert with Ian
Dewar. We performed The Two
Gendarmes. The EA Chronicle’ s reviewer
remarked, ‘Dewar and Honeycombe presented Offenbach’s
Gendarmes with precision and assurance, as befitted Savoyards in training. Honeycombe’s serene falsetto in particular
was a howling success.’ Of this I have
no memory whatsoever.
The Mikado was presented on the big new
stage for four nights, from Wednesday, 20 to Saturday, 23 May 1953. In the cast were Fergus Harris as Ko-Ko, Ian
Dewar as Pooh-Bah, HJL (Hughie) Allan as Nanki-Poo, and the three little maids
were played by KH Murcott, RM (Ronnie) Sinclair (who had been my servant,
Lucius, in Julius Caesar) and AM Kerr.
Besides having a fine tenor voice, Hughie Allan was an excellent
cricketer and captain of the First Eleven.
He was also a senior ephor, the pipe-major of the CCF Pipe Band,
vice-captain of the First Fifteen and captain of squash.
There were 43 boys and three masters in
the Chorus of Japanese gentlemen and school-girls, and among the former were
Billy Balfour, Adrian Carswell and my alphabetical classmates in Class Va
in the Prep, PJ Heavens and HMJ Kindness.
Among the school-girls was GAE (Giles) Gordon. But more about him later.
Although spoken about in Act One, the
Mikado doesn’t actually appear until a third of the way through Act Two. Preceded by the Chorus, he makes a grand
entrance, with his daughter-in-law, Katisha.
When the production was being cast I had boldly put myself forward as
suitable to play Katisha, who had more to sing and do than the Mikado. I could still manage a kind of contralto and
would have made a huge and hideous Katisha.
The boy chosen to play her, GM Cairns, was short and dumpy, with neither
a strong voice nor much of a presence.
This made my performance as the Mikado the more effective as I towered
over him and had one of the best songs in the show. I also had a splendid pink and gold costume,
with a dragon on it, a close-fitting bald wig with a Japanese head-dress, and a
large fan, which I wielded with vigour. I was never comfortable with the traditional
laugh in the Mikado’s song, which is supposed to end with a mirthless
screech. I embarrassed myself doing
it. But in costume and on stage I was
able to let fly – as if I was about to be sick.
The Chronicle’s reviewer found nice things
to say about everyone. About my
performance he wrote, ‘Last to enter upon the scene, but certainly not least,
was the Mikado himself, whose majestic figure towered over all others. Here was the most accomplished actor and
singer of all this gifted company. One
had always imagined that particular brand of laugh to be the exclusive property
of Darrell Fancourt, and if Honeycombe was seeking to mould himself on that
actor, his object was indeed achieved.’
For the Curtain Call at the end of the
performance I was placed centre stage, between Murcott and Cairns.
I liked being there.
AD, who had driven up to Prestwick to stay
with Billy Elder for three weeks, made several short visits to Stirling and Edinburgh, and saw the
last night of The Mikado – with my parents and Marion, I presume. In her Memories she wrote, ‘Ronald’s
appearance and performance exceeded all my expectations. He was six feet four inches tall and ramrod
straight. He wore a magnificent costume
and his first entrance was truly impressive.
He had a strong and articulate voice and acted well. In my
opinion he was an outstanding success: I was delighted.’
Many years later I would play the Emperor
of China in the pantomime of Aladdin (twice); and in Australia,
even later on, I appeared again in The Mikado for the Gilbert and Sullivan
Society in Perth. But this time I wasn’t cast as the Mikado,
for which I auditioned, but as Pooh-Bah.
It was in this year, or the year before,
that a group of senior boys from the Academy was invited to sing in the chorus
at a performance of St Matthew’s Passion by Bach. It took place in the Usher Hall and the
chorus was made up, for some reason, from teenage boys and girls from all the
major schools in Edinburgh. The soloists were professional singers, and
the music, the place and the performance were excitingly different and
grand. Later on, I would sing, mainly
as a soloist, at a wide variety of theatrical venues – including the Players
Theatre in London, the Aldwych Theatre, the Wimbledon
Theatre, the Dominion Theatre, the Old Vic, the London Palladium, the Theatre
Royal, Drury Lane,
and even the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The last five in that list were gala
events, most for special charities, the last being in a show staged by the
Friends of the Opera House and performed before the Prince and Princess of
Wales. In this I sang a Victorian
ballad, ‘Shall I be an Angel, Daddy?’ with Anne Diamond (we were both at TV-am
at the time). Taking the Curtain Call
on that huge stage, where the most famous opera-singers and ballet-dancers in
the world had stood and been applauded, was supremely exhilarating and unreal.
In the summer of 1953 we were visited at Oxgangs Road by
Diana Bond, who had known Marion in Karachi and whose
American father, Orlo Bond, had worked at the offices of Standard Vacuum in McLeod Road. Diana was two years younger than Marion and four years
older than me. Aged 20 she had come to Scotland in September 1952 to study English Literature,
Geography and Psychology at Edinburgh
University, which she
left in June 1953. ‘I took the exams
but failed miserably,’ she told me years later. However, she learned the joys of Scottish
Country Dancing and fell in love with Scotland. Having spent Christmas with Yule Rennie and
his wife, Jennie, in the minister’s manse in a village called Fowlis Wester in
Perthshire, where he officiated at the ancient church of St Bean’s, she then
lodged with us at Oxgangs Road until her Edinburgh hostel, St Leonards Hall
near Arthur’s Seat, opened for students after the Christmas holiday. She had a bad cold and remembered being served
breakfast in bed by my mother and me – she’d been accommodated in my sister’s
bedroom upstairs. Marion must have temporarily lodged
elsewhere. Diana also went with me and my mother to see
a touring production of The Mikado by the D’Oyly Carte Company, during which I
paid particular attention to the performance of the Mikado and his laugh.
‘Your family were so wonderful to me,’
Diana said. ‘I think I was at your
house every week for tea, and you and Marion were so kind to squire me round
the city. Jim and Marion took me to
places too.’ Diana gave me the piano
music of The King and I, which she had seen in New York in 1951, when it was premiered on
Broadway starring Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner. Some 60 years later she sent me copies of
her mother’s letters written in 1936.
As with my mother, Marion
had kept in touch with some of her Karachi
friends apart from Diana Bond – Alison Walker had visited Edinburgh
in 1949 – and no doubt Marion
went south more than once to stay with Alison.
She also went youth-hostelling more than once with a girl-friend called
Heather Bell. Her best friend, Joan, had
married in April 1952. Another visitor
was my cousin, Eileen Duncan, who for a time worked in Edinburgh in a geography department at the
University.
There was a continuous contact between the
Frasers, the Duncans and us, as well as with some families from Karachi. In
April 1953, to everyone’e surprise, my mother’s lame and younger brother,
Archie Fraser, an accountant’s clerk, married a 53-year old dressmaker, Eveline
Gordon, in April 1953, when he was 50. They
lived in a dingy flat in Glasgow. She
was a dumpy, dour and rather ugly woman.
Five years later she had a heart attack and died. When Archie, now a widower, retired, he settled
in Edinburgh, coincidentally in the Queens Bay Hotel in Joppa, which had been
managed by Henry Honeycombe for a few years before the First World War, and had
been home for a while to my father and his sister. It was now a gloomy, run-down, residential
establishment, being used by the aged and infirm. I was taken by my mother to visit Uncle
Archie there. Now in his early 60s, he
was ill-looking, with large discoloured hands, a thin, high, weedy voice and
very little to say. He wasn’t
interested in me, nor I with him. He
played a lot of bridge to pass the time and died, aged 86, in 1989.
I never met my mother’s older brother, Ian,
although he lived in Edinburgh, and I only met
her youngest brother, Harry Fraser, once, in Glasgow.
In the 1970s, while I was still at
ITN, a call was put through to me from the police in Glasgow.
The caller, sounding rather constrained, asked me if I was acquainted
with a certain Henry Fraser, who claimed to be an uncle of mine. I said I didn’t have an uncle of that name,
and was told that Henry Fraser had recently died and used to tell people I was
his nephew. Though mystified for a
while, I eventually realised that Henry must be Harry. It transpired that Harry, an alcoholic, had
died in a hostel for down-and-outs in Glasgow,
where he used to tell the disbelieving inmates, when they watched the TV News,
that I was his nephew. Alas, poor
Harry. I gave the policeman my mother’s address.
A television event that had a hidden
significance for me, apart from the fact that it was the first time I had seen
a TV set or any television programme, was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
on Tuesday, 2 June 1953. The occasion
had been declared a public holiday, and like more than 20 million other people
we crowded into a neighbour’s house – few homes had TV then -- to view the
resplendent ceremonies as they happened, broadcast from far away London in
blurry black and white tinged with blue.
It was totally fascinating, amazing and thrilling – the historic scene
in the Abbey, the royal family, the opulent robes of the royals, of the
nobility and the clergy, the stirring shouts of ‘Vivat!’ and the stupendous choral
music of Zadok the Priest.
One day I would be presented to the Queen
and meet and write about her daughter-in-law, Diana, the Princess of Wales.
6. EDINBURGH, 1953-55
My end of term report in July 1953 was
better than the two previous ones. The
Rector, Rob Watt, commenting on my history lessons with him, said, ‘He has come
on considerably during the session, in appreciation of the significance of a
question & in the relevance & effectiveness of his reply. His work now shows good promise.’ Dr Isaac said, ‘His work has been of a
serious nature only since the performance of “The Mikado”. His essays now reveal fair reading and some
thought.’ Speaking as my Class Master, Wilf Hook said,
‘I do not feel that he is yet fully committed to his work: he still lives too
much in the interior of his mind. The
next six months will really be decisive for his future.’ The trouble was that my creative energies and
interests were directed elsewhere. Not
being an intellectual or a scholar, at school I did what was asked of me but
little more, except when I was on stage or writing for myself.
Despite the masters’ doubts and
reservations, I again ‘satisfied the examiners’ in July in two subjects of the
GCE Examinations at Advanced Level, the subjects being English and
History. Considering that I was not yet
17, and had polished off both my ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels at the ages of 15 and 16,
it was a creditable performance. The
following summer I added another subject to my list, having obtained a pass in
Higher Latin in the exams for the Scottish Leaving Certificate. This was the equivalent of getting a GCE ‘A’
Level in Latin and provided me with enough academic qualifications to enter Oxford or Cambridge. I have no recollection of studying for these
exams or of where they were held. As
before, I looked at previous papers, worked out the most likely questions
concerning persons and periods and learned some quotations that seemed as if
they might be useful.
Somehow I found the time to write another
poem, my third. It was called Ode on the
Eve of James’ Departure and was dated 9 July 1953. Addressed to the favourite Seventh Modern
clown, James Crerar, it had four sections, each with a different verse and
rhyming scheme, and was in imitation of the overblown poems of the seventeenth
century, with their classical references, their adulatory and admonitory
language. Shelley was also an
influence. The Invocation began as
follows …
‘Oh, Muse, descend from off thy
courtly throne!
Invest thy youngest son, as yet
unknown,
With fairest honoured laurels
of thine own,
From hands so pure the summit’s snow doth
weep to earth!’
Next came the Exaltation, the Exhortation
and lastly the Valediction. The
Exaltation included references to the high jinks and horseplay that happened
during free periods and breaks.
‘When thou hast gone, this room
shall lose thy merry fame:
No more shalt thou our sorrows,
sulky fears and spite,
By virtue of thy sudden wit and
humoured sort
In postures strange, achieved in
playful sport;
No more shalt thou disperse our
woes with thy sad plight.
Where shall we find that musical
hilarity,
Which thou inspiredst into our
quartet’s madrigal?
Or where again shall that delight
so comical
Break forth to see thee floorward
sprawl precipitously?
The Exhortation was suitably solemn and
portentous …
‘Look round, O James, at
this thy School,
Where thou hast played,
so oft, the fool;
What clear accomplishments
are yours?
Whence came for you the
loud applause?
What cups and caps and
books have you?
Where are the stripes and
colours new?
If that thy thoughts are
heavenly,
Such things, ‘tis true, are
vanity;
But men attach great cost
to such,
And foolish count their
price too much.’
And so on. Despite his fooling about, James secured a
place in a Cambridge
college and we never saw him again.
His place and that of the others who left
Seventh Modern at the end of the Summer Term was taken by JB (Brian) Neill, MJ
Donaldson, Michael Somen and an American, Ken McIntosh. Others, like Adrian Carswell, though part of
Seventh Modern, weren’t tutored in the Library. John Gordon, Fergus Harris, Anton McLauchlan
and I were the Library stalwarts. In
Free periods or in Breaks we sometimes played chess. I was never very good at this and usually
lost. Mostly we fooled about, doing
Goon Show imitations. Anarchic and
surreal, the comedy half-hour of The Goon Show performed by Harry Secombe, Peter
Sellers and Spike Milligan, was transmitted on BBC Radio’s Home Service, from
1951 to 1960. Harry Secombe was Neddie
Seagoon. John Gordon was so successful
at assuming the catch-phrases, bluster and posturing of Neddie Seagoon, that he
became known as Neddie.
During the summer holidays I seem not to
have gone away. I think this was
because I was now immersed in gardening, in piano-playing and composing when I
wasn’t reading. I also went to the
cinema nearly every week and occasionally to the theatre. It was in September 1953 tht I saw the Old
Vic production of Hamlet in the Assembly Hall, with Richard Burton as Hamlet,
Claire Bloom as Ophelia and Michael Hordern as Polonius. It didn’t impress me. Burton,
who was at that time 28 and, though married to his first wife, was conducting a
blatant affair with Claire Bloom and drinking heavily, was, I thought, too
moody, stone-faced and baleful. Little
did I know that one day I would bump into Richard Burton, understudy Michael
Hordern, and picnic with Claire Bloom.
To return to what I was reading in
1953. What I was reading every week
were mainly comics.
Comics must have become the most frequent
feature of my reading, from when I came to Edinburgh in 1946. American comics, like Captain Marvel and
Superman, had been devoured, when available, in Karachi, but they had nothing to do with real
people and what I knew of life. This
was everywhere reflected in the English comics. Most of the characters in the comic strips
were also about my age. The Beano and
The Dandy, created and published in Dundee,
were the most popular comics, with pages devoted to regular characters like
Lord Snooty and his Pals and Dennis the Menace in The Beano, and Korky the Cat,
Beryl the Peril, Black Bob and Desperate Dan in The Dandy. The Hotspur, The Wizard and The Rover
contained the adventures of older boys and adults in short story form, and when
the Eagle appeared in April 1950, it was not only in colour, had glossy pages
and was larger than other comics, but contained a wide range of stories and
items of an improving or instructional nature.
Its main hero was Dan Dare, a space pilot with a crooked eyebrow, who
battled against the forces of evil on Earth and on other planets, most notably
the bad and big-brained Mekon. The
Sunday papers had comic strips of course, the most avidly read being Oor Wullie
and The Broons in the Sunday Post.
The
daily papers were not much read by me – I never saw The Times. But the Sunday papers, like the Sunday
Express and the News of the World, were read right through.
My father did the Littlewood’s football
pools every week, and now and then asked me to fill up a column of home wins,
away wins and draws. I won something
infinitesimal once, but he twice shared in a fourth dividend and received about
£30. Walking to the end of our road to
get the Sunday papers from the corner store on Sunday mornings became something
of a ritual for me and while there I would buy some sweets or an iced
lolly. Sweet rationing ended in
February 1953, and so visits to the dentist became almost annual. Sugar rationing ended seven months
later.
Picture Post, and occasionally the
Illustrated London News, was always lying about at home, along with some
women’s magazines. I flicked through
them all. My mother removed any
material that she thought I shouldn’t see, but she had to be quick. An article, with photos, about Roberta
Cowell, the first man to be made into a woman, in 1951 – he had been a Spitfire
pilot and a racing-driver -- disappeared.
But I had already read his extraordinary story.
In
the 1950s I was running out of books to read, having read all 12 of Arthur
Ransome’s books about the Swallows and Amazons (the last of them, Great
Northern? was published in 1947) and nearly all the books about Biggles and
most of the 39 books Richmal Crompton wrote about William and his chums. I discovered the few books written by
Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, the first, The Far-Distant Oxus being about
a group of children, with ponies, on Exmoor. It was written when they were teenagers and
still at school, and that book and the sequels were even better than Arthur
Ransome’s stories. Crowns, published in
1947, is the most magical children’s book ever written, surpassing anything
about H Potter. Literary classics by
Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy (my favourite author – I read all his novels
eventually), I was prompted to read by my English masters. And I tried to read the novels of Virginia
Woolf, the most accessible (to me) being Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Trollope, Jane Austen and George Eliot I
didn’t read until I was at Oxford.
Such was the shortage of new reading
material when we went to live in Oxgangs Road that I began going through my
sister’s collection of novels, in particular the ones she had by Peter Cheyney. These books, mainly published during the
war, centred on a seedy private detective called Slim Callaghan. In a way they foreshadowed James Bond, and
had titles like Dangerous Curves. The
ones with ‘Dark’ in the title, like Dark Interlude, were the best. Fictional family sagas like The Herb of
Grace, by Elizabeth Goudge, were compulsive reading, and her Green Dolphin
Country, which was set on the Channel Islands and in New Zealand, both of which
I would visit in due course, was a powerful influence on my imagination and
future story-telling. It even inspired me
to write a musical.
Ever since we acquired an upright piano, I
had been hammering out simplified versions of Rachmaninov’s and Tchaikovsky’s
piano concertos, among other classical pieces, as well as songs from shows like
South Pacific, and songs written by Ivor Novello. Songs of my own came to life when my fingers
wandered idly over the black and white keys.
Usually they arose when I was experimenting with chords and key changes.
Eventually I decided to write a
musical, words and music. It was called
Virginia and was set, not in America, but in New Zealand, of which I knew
nothing at all, apart from what I’d read in Green Dolphin Country. My ignorance was slightly reduced by browsing
through Bob Finlayson’s gift to me of the 12 volumes of Everyman’s
Encyclopaedia.
The actual composing of the music for Virginia probably didn’t
happen until 1954, as it was in January 1954 I went back to Mr Howells for
lessons in Music Theory. At the end of
the Easter Term, ie, in March, he wrote in a brief report, ‘Excellent. Should soon commence to study Harmony.’ This was followed at the end of the Summer
Term by ‘Very good progress in his study of harmony. He is inclined to be too ambitious for the
amount of theoretical knowledge he has so far acquired, but he certainly has
ideas and should be encouraged to develop these. Further study of harmony and counterpoint is
required, as well as a knowledge of orchestration.’
But as far as I was concerned I had
learned enough to translate my melodies into musical notations on a blank page
of ruled bass and treble clefs, and I abandoned any further studies in
counterpoint and orchestration. I was
only interested in the magical process of composing, of putting what was in my
head and what I was playing into the written equivalents on a page. I was a writer more than anything else, and
became absorbed by what I wrote – music had a language. It was a creative process similar to that
involved in writing a sentence, a chapter, a book. I would stare at the blank sheet of music as
I would later stare at a blank page, and if what was in my mind sounded right,
I wrote it down, making something out of nothing.
Virginia
was about a group of pioneering families in New Zealand, who were being menaced
by warring Maoris. It ended with a
spectacular earthquake. There were
young lovers and an elderly widow who found happiness with a sea-captain. Some of the piano music has survived --
mixed up with a piano sonata and songs I wrote at Oxford for another musical (more of that
later) -- but not the lyrics or the libretto.
They were later destroyed.
Nonetheless, after Bill Nicoll’s mother had kindly typed out the
libretto for me, I took a copy of that and some of the songs to the George Hotel
in George Street,
where Anna Neagle was staying. She must
have been touring in The Glorious Days.
I think there was an acknowledgement that the script and songs had been
received, but that was all. An elderly widow in New Zealand can’t have been the
kind of part Anna Neagle wanted to play.
Undaunted, I then began another
musical. This one was called Girl in
Love and centred on two separate school parties, of boys and girls, ready-made choruses,
on holiday in Switzerland. Teachers, male and female filled out the
cast and the adult roles. However, the
plot-lines eluded me, as well as the characters, and I abandoned the whole
thing.
It seems quite unbelievable to me now that
I wrote one and a half musicals by the age of 18, on top of everything
else. But in doing so I realised that I
was, sadly, not destined to be the next Ivor Novello, and that although I was
full of imaginative ideas, I was restricted by my age and lack of experience
from giving them any credibility.
Having already discarded the possibilities of making a living by
sculpting, or painting, or singing or acting – all of which I considered – I
thought about writing a book. After
all, Alec Waugh had been 17 when he wrote The Loom of Youth, which Aunt Ada had
given to me as a birthday present as long ago as 1947. And Katherine Hull and Pamela Whitlock had still
been at school when they wrote their first Oxus
story. It seemed that I had no
alternative to be a writer – and had I not written poems and the opening
chapter of Mole when I was not yet seven?
Realistically, the only thing I knew anything about was schoolboys and
my school. But what would be the
story? What would it be about, and who
would be the hero? This bothered me
until I began reading some of the novels of Virginia Woolf in 1954.
In
the meantime, the new session at the Academy began with the start of the Winter
Term of 1953. I was now 17. It was announced that the play by Shakespeare
to be staged in May 1954 was Twelfth Night, which I’d never read. It would be directed by Puddle Ford and I
would play Malvolio. There were never any formal auditions. Some boys were selected to read scenes from
the play, their height, vocal clarity and (apparent) understanding of what they
read determining what parts they played.
Rehearsals began in a leisurely fashion that term.
It was about this time that the gravel of
the Yards was replaced by a much smoother surface of asphalt, and the incidence
of cut knees and grazes was markedly reduced.
During this term I wrote two more poems,
both about rugby, in the same loose format but from opposing points of
view The Rugby Match was dated 31
October and was occasioned by a Divisional game on a Saturday at which I was a
disenchanted and very cold spectator.
It began:
‘A cold wind blowing,
swirling a fly
Down among the
crowd;
People watch with hands
thrust deep
In gloves, in
pockets;
Faces pinched,
grey-lined, as if a corpse
Had slipped its shroud.
Some masters, standing
back, breaking the blast,
Moving in restless
sockets
Their eyes, thinking of
things obtuse –
These boys will soon
have left –
They couldn’t care. A hypocrite crew,
Crying, “Oh, well played!”
What is their life? The same empty phrases
Split from minds
bereft
Of new truth, new
thought, new hope,
But dogmas decayed,
Dry, with a loser’s
delight in wielding
A power on boys.
No doers they … What is
their life?
Not even they can
tell.
The rest of the poem was about the
spectators’ and players’ reactions to an unexceptional game. It ended …
“What was the score? Six-nil?
Not too bad.
God, what a shag!”
There’s no applause on
the rumpled field,
No crash tackle on
the wing,
No bitter scrummage when
we nearly scored,
No spectators, no
one there.
Dead as the autumn
leaves twirling
Between the tall
posts,
Vaporising like steamy
breathing
In the ashen air.
Nothing of the rugger
match, nothing.
The clouds sweep
up the ghosts.
There’s a cold wind
blowing and the rain is coming.
The other poem, Carmichael
v Cockburn, was a player’s paean in praise of the game and was dated 5
November. It began:
God, what a great game
rugger is!
Nothing like it!
Streaking down the
field with the ball
In a fearsome
clinch,
Then battering through
the tackling backs,
Who clog your
strength and strike it
With their filthy arms,
until the ball has gone,
And down you go
to pinch
The greasy grass with
a twelve-stone weight
Heaving across
your legs.
I
was imagining the player to be John Gordon, who was in Carmichael
like me. It ended:
A near thing,
but two
Of our best men were injured in the
Firsts.
Oh, the blissful
ache of winning,
Talking it tiredly
over with the rest
Of the team,
then the few
Your friends, relaxing, sweetly exhausted
In the tram,
thoughts spinning
Yet knowing – God,
what a great game rugger is!
These effusions were not shown to any
master, but copies would have been given to those in Seventh Modern, like John
Gordon, who had played rugby in the Divisional Competitions.
It was probably in October that my mother
button-holed Laurence Olivier at the stage door of the King’s Theatre. He and his wife, Vivien Leigh, were on a
try-out tour of a few provincial cities before the first night, at the Phoenix
Theatre in London
on 5 November, of Terence Rattigan’s new play, The Sleeping Prince. It was
Vivien Leigh’s 40th birthday.
She had only recently recovered from a complete mental and emotional
breakdown in Hollywood
during the filming of Elephant Walk. My mother was very eager to tell Olivier about
her talented son, the budding actor.
Fortunately I only heard about this later. I hate to think what she said to him, and
how she must have flirted with him.
What he said in reply – what could he say? – was probably polite. I expect that he recommended that her
talented son should go to a drama school.
Olivier’s next major project was the film
of Richard III. And one day I
auditioned for him. But more about that
later.
At
the end of the Winter Term my school report was more favourable than
usual. Dr Isaac wrote, ‘His essays have
improved not only in the reading revealed but also in the weight of opinion
expressed in them.’ Jack Bevan said,
‘The standard of his written work has improved considerably. He is now much more confident and
authoritative: with the quality improving, it is to be hoped that the quantity
will be unrationed.’ Mr Heath, who was
taking me for Latin this session, wrote, ‘He has done enterprising and even
distinguished work.’ Heath had been an Oxford Greyhound but was now
rather solidly built. In his class he had an uncomfortable habit, as
I’ve said, of sitting beside you and putting his arm around you while he
assisted you with some problem with the Latin text. He and his wife had established a
Play-reading Society, the plays being read after school in their comfortable
home in one of the Houses, where cups of tea and biscuits were provided. There was a certain amount of doubling of
parts and any female roles were read, diffidently, by the boys. I recall playing the leading role in
Journey’s End and the female lead in Idiot’s Delight by Robert Sherwood. Readings
took place infrequently, perhaps only twice a year. Heath himself was at the Academy for 40
years.
Wilf Hook, however, was still doubtful
about my academic capabilities. He
wrote, ‘His chief work this term has been in Shakespeare. His critical essays continue to improve, but
there is still a curious parsimony about his exertions … He is certainly a
puzzle – what is he after?’ Hook’s
Class Master report ended with, ‘His chief difficulty is a temperamental one:
he is too aloof to commit himself wholeheartedly; but he can certainly work
hard when he cares about it.’ Very
true.
I came in for more criticism in the annual
school Chronicle, when the School Concert, given in the Spring Term, on Friday,
26 February 1954, was reviewed. The
short programme included items by Mozart and Bach and ended with a Choral
Fantasia on Gounod’s Faust. Our
American, Ken McIntosh, who played the horn and left the Academy in the summer,
was praised for his ‘remarkable virtuosity’ in the Andante from Mozart’s Horn
Concerto. Fergus Harris and myself, who
both sang two songs from Sandford’s Songs of the Sea, were not so highly
rated. The reviewer wrote, ‘The voices
of WF Harris and RG Honeycombe did not seem to be sufficiently robust to deal
adequately with rollicking parts and they were obviously happier in the
comparative peace of the other songs.’
Very true as far as I was concerned. I felt exposed on the platform, facing the
audience as myself, with no costume or character to hide me. The songs I sang, which I didn’t choose and
didn’t much like, were Homeward Bound and The Old Superb. Despite the inadequacy of Harris and myself,
the reviewer concluded that it was ‘a concert of real merit’ and he deplored
the smallness of the audience.
I
was singing in public again at what the Chronicle called ‘a short informal
concert’ given by the school orchestra on Wednesday 31 March, the last day of
the Spring Term. The programme included
music by Mozart, Delibes and Elgar’s March, Pomp and Circumstance No 4. Adrian Carswell’s playing of a Sibelius
waltz was ‘sensitive and controlled’ according to the reviewer, who described
the solos sung by me and Fergus Harris as ‘comparatively disappointing.’ I’m not surprised. The
piece chosen for me was Schubert’s passionately romantic To Music. What did I know of love and romance? Nothing, as yet.
My worst report followed. Hook said of my English lessons, ‘From time
to time he gives glimpses of some authentic ability. He is still unwilling or unable to contribute
anything to class discussion. His
progress is not decisive enough to give well founded hopes of an English
scholarship next year.’ As my Class Master,
he wrote, ‘His attitude is too negative.
Much of the work set (provided it does not call for serious thinking) is
done competently, but beyond this there is an iron curtain: rumour and
speculation do not hint at much activity in this zone of silence.’
If I had known about what he wrote, or
cared, this might have sounded fairly dire.
As it is, it sounds to me now as if he took my indifference personally
and as if he reacted strangely to me. I
didn’t care for him. I didn’t care for
the sarcastic jibes and little sneers and sniffs he directed at me. Bevan of course backed him up, for although
he thought the quality of my written work had improved, he said, ‘Unfortunately
he hasn’t been able to do much owing to his preoccupations with other
things. His lack of enthusiasm and zest
is somewhat disconcerting.’ Mr Heath
was more complimentary – I was placed second out of the eight in his Latin
class and he expected me to pass Higher Grade in Latin in the Scottish Leaving
Certificate quite comfortably, as I did.
Meanwhile, I had begun writing sonnets,
the first being dated 7 February 1954.
I wrote 22 in all over the next five years, plus some other short
poems. The sonnets were written with
Gerald Manley Hopkins’ innovative versifying in mind. They didn’t rhyme, apart from the couplet at
the end. They were full of assonance and
internal rhymes, and the verse patterns of the first six lines were repeated in
the second six.
The first sonnet, called October:
Conversation, was written when I was in bed with a cold – as was the second,
dated 9 February. This one was called
Cold Comfort.
‘This wall is mine, this bed, this room is
mine,
But meaningless am I among them as they
less me:
Do I so serve who only sit and sneeze?
Unreal existence, dowsing morning in
absurdity,
Annulled from reality, dully wheeling
like seagulls
Adrift below summer blue. Where’s
your intention, your use?
Is each in life this dead that meets
no man,
Companionless exists, seeking none and
sought by none?
Is living then to seize, to suck life
blood?
No, drowsing speculation surfaces from
memory,
To languish like jelly-fish lulled on
shore till withdrawing,
And brings a new awareness of things of
deep wonder suborned.
Tomorrow’s morning another performance
shall start:
Fit time is this to sit and learn
my part.’
Other sonnets were about Melrose Abbey and
Dryburgh Abbey, which I must have visited in the summer of 1954. I was most pleased with the one about
Dryburgh Abbey, which began, ‘Lilac and laburnum lambent low hung there.’
In 1955
the sonnets became more personal. My
greatest work, in terms of length, was personal but quite different, a mock
epic poem based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, called Jake, which was written over
the winter of 1954-55 and wasn’t completed until March 1955.
At some point in the Spring of 1954, in
March or April, we left 48 Oxgangs
Road and moved back into the city, into a flat at 16 Great King Street,
which was in the New Town. Great King Street ran
east and west across Dundas Street,
and was only ten minutes away from Henderson Row. This meant that I didn’t have to get up so
early and could walk down the hill to the Academy. But after a full day at school, that
included rehearsals for Twelfth Night and CCF drills, etc, I usually got a tram
up the hill. After rugby practice or
cricket, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I always got a tram back home from New
Field.
I have no idea why we moved from the edge
of the city to its middle, to a flat which occupied the top two floors of a
town house and was reached by two flights of stairs. There
was also a flight of stairs within the flat to the bedrooms at the top. From my north-facing bedroom the Firth of
Forth and the hills of Fife could be glimpsed
beyond the roof-tops of Cumberland
Street.
The flat wasn’t as comfortable as the bungalow in Oxgangs Road – the ceilings were high,
the furnishings old-fashioned and worn. And I missed the garden and gardening. However, it may have had some form of
central heating.
It was a smart address, but an odd choice
in view of my father’s deteriorating health.
He had emphysema, and climbing two flights of stairs and then another to
get to his bedroom must have been a struggle for him and have done him no good
at all. It seems, from what AD says in
her Memories, that he didn’t see my performance as Malvolio as he was staying
in Prestwick with Billy Elder in the second
half of May. It’s odd that he went away
then, unless he found the stairs too much for him and needed a rest.
Twelfth Night was performed at the Academy
for four nights, beginning on Wednesday, 19 May. Puddle Ford, who directed the play, had a
recording made of one of the performances and when I hear it now I am astonished
by the apparent professionalism of the cast – the vivid characterisations, the vocal
energy, the seemingly expert timing of lines and jokes, and the gales of
laughter emanating from the audience.
John Gordon was Orsino, GC Averill was Sir Toby, Adrian Carswell Sir
Andrew Aguecheek, Ronnie Sinclair Maria, Ross Anderson the Priest, and Fergus
Harris Feste. KH Murcott, previously
Yum-Yum, was Viola and AM Kerr Olivia.
Several junior and senior ephors played minor parts: Poker Morrison was
an Officer, JK (Jake) Millar was a Sea Captain, and FHD (Nuts or Nutty) Walker
Antonio. Bill Nicoll was a
recorder-playing musician and Anton McLauchlan an assistant electrician.
Jake, a rough diamond playing a rough
sea-dog with a gruff voice, did his best to make Orsino sound like Arsino, and
in saying, ‘A virtuous maid, the daughter of a count,’ contrived at a Dress
Rehearsal to leave the ‘o’ out of ‘count’.
And he managed to make it sound rather rude in performance, even with
the ‘o’.
The production, simply presented on an
open stage in Elizabethan costume, was reviewed for the Chronicle by an eminent
Scottish playwright, Robert Kemp, whose two sons were at the Academy.
He wrote, ‘The play flowed sweetly (the
result of good planning and rehearsal).
Its lyricism was allowed to well up in a natural and unforced way, and
the comic business was extremely well conceived and carried out … It is hard
not to single out for comment first the Malvolio of RG Honeycombe, partly
because this is the “biggest” and most difficult part in the play, calling for
depth and quality in the actor, and partly because Honeycombe seems to be
advancing beyond the stage where all is natural to the more interesting realm
where art is controlled and conscious … It was not by mere height that he
dominated the scene, but by a well-co-ordinated conception of the character, in
which pompous speech, Puritan black and final outrage all played their
parts.’ Kemp went on to praise in some
measure all the main characters, especially Averill and Carswell, and spoke of
the ‘vigorous and deservedly popular performance of the Sea Captain by JK
Millar, matched by FHD Walker’s sterling Antonio.’
We were well tutored by Puddle Ford, and
once we had learned to assume certain vocal and physical characteristics and
keep the pace up, instinct and a gleeful enjoyment in the playing of the scenes
took over. To a degree the
personalities we took on were extensions of our own. My skinny legs in black and my stork-like
postures boosted the comic effect. I
also combed my hair forward, shaping it into a fancy fringe, and sported a
small beard on my chin.
My
successes as Malvolio and the Mikado added to my status among the ephors and other
boys in the school, especially among the sporting heroes, like Jake Millar and
Nuts (or Nutty) Walker, who were my age and with whom I associated during
rehearsals. At the Curtain Call they
were at either end of the line-up when I was centre stage. I was now welcomed into their orbits and
greeted as if I were an honorary member of the school elite, whose various
achievements raised them above the commonalty of the 503 boys who were in the Upper School
at the start of the Summer Term. Jake
now addressed me as ‘Honey’ and Nuts hailed me as ‘Ron.’
Jake, Nuts and John Gordon formed a
triumvirate and were often together.
Nuts was 6 feet 4, ie, half an inch shorter than me, fresh-faced, sandy-haired,
slim and wiry, with very clear blue eyes.
Jake and John, who was also known as Neddie or Glug, were an inch or two
shorter. Jake cultivated a tough guy
image and voice and used well-placed four-letter words to comic effect. He had a habit of asserting his dominance
over his adherents and younger boys by lunging at their groins as if to grab
their genitals. Sometimes he did, and
sometimes the boys thus assailed were debagged.
This would be vigorously
resisted, and in the struggle Jake co-opted the help of a henchman or two. But generally he had only to make a sudden
move, a lunge, in the direction of someone’s crotch for that person to double
up in defence and comically protect his marriage prospects with both his hands.
There was I believe no bullying at the
Academy, and no fights. The most
violence was perpetrated before Prayers, when all the classes were seated in
their assigned rows. A boy might be
suddenly slammed on the head for no apparent reason with a hymn-book, by a boy
sitting behind him. This might result
in attempts at retaliation and threats, and hymn-books would be hurled across
the hall.
In England
AD had moved at the end of 1953 into a single room in a guest-house in the
Queen’s Park area of Bournemouth. Towards the end of May she received a letter
from Billy Elder, saying that her brother, Gordon, who had been staying with
Billy, had been taken ill and was in hospital.
AD drove north to Prestwick
straightaway and learned that Louie had only visited Gordon once, on a
day-visit, not even staying the night.
AD talked to his doctors, who told her he was lucky to be alive. She was told that, ‘Emphysema and a heart
condition, a legacy from the First World War, were the causes of his illness,
and a long convalescence would be required.’
He remained in hospital for three or four weeks, after which AD took her
brother back to Billy’s home for a week to regain some of his strength, and
then drove him home to Edinburgh. He was eager to return to Great King Street and hoped to be fit
enough to attend Marion’s
wedding to Jim Campbell.
This took place in the Fairmilehead parish
church on 10 July 1954 and the ceremony was performed by the Rev Gillan. Marion
wore a plain white wedding dress and a simple head-dress. Two of her girl-friends were
bridesmaids. The groom, as well as my
father and I, wore (hired) tails and carried top hats. My mother wore a more subdued dress than
usual, pale silvery blue, with a corsage on her left shoulder. Among the guests were Aunt Donny, Aunt Ada,
Uncle Alastair and Jenny, and Jim’s mother.
The wedding presents, as was the custom, were displayed in our
dining-room.
In her Memories AD wrote, ‘A reception was
held at the Roxburghe Hotel in Charlotte
Square.
Gordon summoned up his strength and managed to keep going all day. He was a proud man as he escorted Marion up the aisle to
meet her bridegroom, Jim Campbell. She
looked lovely in her bridal outfit and was smiling happily as she walked back
down the aisle with her tall husband, an accountant and an Edinburgh policeman’s son. At the reception, exchanges of friendship
and good-will were made amongst the relatives and friends who had travelled
many miles to be present on this special occasion.’ AD then returned to Billy Elder in Prestwick and dutifully took him for a week’s motoring
holiday around the Lowlands of Scotland in August. In September it was Doris Schwyn’s turn to be
driven around the Highlands. It wasn’t until October that AD made the
long drive back to Bournemouth, to the small
guest-house where reduced winter terms were now in operation.
After a brief honeymoon Marion and Jim
moved into a dark bed-sit in a basement in Dean Park Crescent, while awaiting the
completion of a house being built on a new estate west of the city. Occasionally I was invited to have dinner
with them and heard about their problems with the flat and their Polish
landlord. The following year they moved
into a semi-detached house at 117
Broomhall Crescent, Broomhall.
My school report at the end of the Summer
Term was generally rather disparaging, although I still did well enough in
Latin and French. I was no longer
having any History lessons. In place of
them I was writing some General Paper essays set by the Rector, who said of my work,
‘Interesting in parts, but not yet as a whole, & he must exercise greater
precision in his use of words.’ Of my English lessons Hook said, ‘His work
shows occasional flashes of quality, but the immaturity of his judgement is
clearly shown by a rather indecisive performance in comprehension and
interpretation. His general essays can
lay little claim to the distinction of style expected from a potential English
scholar.’ Bevan said, ‘He still has a very long way to
go until he reaches the required standard.’
It was evident by now – as it had been
for some time -- that I would never succeed in getting a scholarship to Oxford
or Cambridge, and that, if I passed the Common Entrance Examination, I would therefore
enter these universities as a Commoner.
I was not devoted to study and not a serious student, and Hook and the
Rector now faced up to these failings, as it must have seemed to them. They relaxed and so did I.
Commenting as my Class Master, Hook wrote,
‘His attitude has improved and I hope he will continue to be more
forthcoming. He has achieved a great
deal both in school work and in some creative school activities, and yet,
curiously, the general make-up of his mind remains immature. I am not in favour of forcing the mind’s
development, but scholarships are awarded partly on evidence of being wise
beyond one’s years.’ The Rector
commented, ‘Both his work, his aesthetic interests & activities (less
widely shared than they should be) & his liabilities (sp, his excessive
height) tend to set him apart & make it difficult for him to unbend &
to open out. But the former will only
be effectively developed if he submits them to the cut & thrust of
criticism & is willing to learn from the critics. The problem of communication with other
minds, orally or on paper (or by other media) is one which the artist -- &
the scholar – must solve, & I wish him success in his efforts in the
ensuing session.’
These remarks were sensible and wise. I never did learn from critics, relying
almost wholly on my own opinions and judgement as I came to realise that the
opinions and judgements of others could be as defective, if not more so, than
mine.
Soon after the end of the Summer Term, on
Tuesday, 27 July, the full complement of the CCF paraded in the Yards, attired
in battledress blouses, Black Watch tartan kilts, full-length whiskery sporrans
with three white tassels, Lowland bonnets, stockings with red flashes, and
black boots. Preceded by the Pipe Band
we marched in one long column from the Academy up the slope to George Street and
then to St Andrew’s Square and down to Waverley Station, where we entrained in
a special train for the CCF’s Summer Camp at Comrie in Perthshire.
My CCF Record of Service tells me that I
had passed my map-reading, shooting, drilling and other military tests at
Dreghorn Barracks on 5 March 1951 and again on the same date a year later, also
that I was proficient in handling a Bren gun, was a second class shot and that
I was qualified to instruct cadets in drill, the rifle, tactics and map-reading
in 1953. And yet I wasn’t promoted to
Corporal until May 1955, having been, I presume, made a L/Cpl the previous
year. This was a source of continuing humiliation
and shame, as other smaller boys, whom I thought were less able, and younger,
were promoted over me. Mr MacIlwaine,
who as a Major was the Officer Commanding the CCF, must have thought I lacked
leadership qualities. Whatever the
reason I was a mere cadet for four years.
The Record of Service also says,
erroneously, that I attended two annual CCF camps, at Dallaghy in 1952 and at
Barry in 1953. In fact I attended
neither. My mother, who was averse to
the school’s military activities, probably persuaded a doctor to provide a
letter saying that I had a cold or was otherwise unfit or incapacitated. My first CCF camp was at Cultybraggan, near
Comrie, in July 1954, and being my first camp it made a lasting impression on
me.
When the CCF contingent paraded in the
school Yards on 27 July, I was made right marker, for no other reason than that
I was the tallest cadet in the parade.
On the command, ‘Right marker!’ I marched out importantly to a
designated spot in front of the uniformed and kilted assemblage, all bearing
rifles, who, when commanded, lined up beside me, on my left in one long line,
and were then rearranged, three abreast.
Following on behind the CSM, Jake Millar, and the Pipe Band, in effect I
led the long column all the way to Waverley Station. Trams stopped for us and policemen cleared
the way. It was immensely satisfying, marching to the
skirl of the pipes and the rhythmic rat-a-tat of the drums, with swinging kilts
and swaying sporrans and Edinburgh
citizens pausing to stand and stare.
Arriving at Comrie after a short and rowdy
train journey, we marched two miles south to an old Army camp called
Cultybraggan, where we played at being soldiers for a week.
It wasn’t until I did a search for
Cultybraggan on the Internet that I learned that it had been a POW Camp during
the war. Built in 1939 as a maximum
security prison, it had housed up to 4,000 German and Italian prisoners of
war. The Germans included soldiers of
the Afrika Korps and the SS, and even Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. Towards the end of the war an unpopular German
sergeant-major was murdered there, brutally beaten and kicked by five young
German soldiers, aged 20 or 21, and then hanged in a hut latrine. All five were later hanged themselves by
Albert Pierrepoint at Pentonville in October 1945. After the war Cultybraggan was used as a
training site by the Ministry of Defence.
Now schoolboys slept in Nissen huts with curving roofs and windows that
projected along both sides, in huts where real soldiers had once slept and
dreamed of war and death.
For us, playing at being soldiers was
almost like a holiday. We had few
worries and didn’t have to wonder what to do.
Our days were organised, our meals were sufficient, and off-duty we
indulged ourselves with communal activities.
The wearing of a uniform, as with other uniforms, provided a cloak of
anonymity and shared purpose, and promoted feelings of solidarity and
comradeship.
The following winter I wrote a blank verse
poem of about 900 lines which I called Jake, a modern epic. It was in a mock heroic, MIltonic style,
with extensive metaphors, generally classical in content, and its hero was
Jake, who left the Academy that summer.
The crown of being the CSM then passed to Nuts Walker. Other characters included John Gordon
(Neddie), Brian Neil (Podge), Fergus Robertson (Robbie), AG McGregor (Sergeant
Fester) and Ron. We were still avid
listeners of The Goon Show on the radio.
By this time John Gordon was universally known as Neddie. Robbie
imitated Bluebottle, Alan McGregor Moriarty, and I both Henry and Minnie Crun.
I wasn’t very good at dialogue, especially
my own, but the description of what we did is detailed and informative, and
some edited passages follow in the ensuing paragraphs, with the blank verse
lines of the epic run together as prose.
The
poem began on the Wednesday morning.
‘Jake was cold. He thrashed around his bed and hitched a
rough brown blanket off the floor; but yet the crumpled mattress-sheet seemed
ice, and sparse the straw within congealed in lumps defied his heavy efforts to
conform its shape to his. He swore, for
every time he turned his bedsprings creaked and discords sang till, sullen with
discomfort, Jake lay still, and squinting down the hut’s decreasing length,
recalled the martial Corps in Column of March but yesterday, preceded by the
Band … Some thirty wretches who in conscious pride had then flung stern regards
on civil life now fretted flattened pillows in vague unease … Pale sunshine
laid an elbow here and there, on rusted stove, on cracked and dusty floor, on
dull brass buckles, blancoed belts rubbed grey, on sloppy kilts, on scattered
kit and clothes.’
Jake’s
hut is aroused at 6.30 by a sergeant-major banging his stick on the iron ribs
of the curved roof of the hut. He then
barges in, slamming the door, and shouts at those still in bed to get up. Jake puts on his denims, and with a towel
slung over his shoulder, he leaves the hut in Fester’s hands and strolls out
for a wash. ‘Freshly gleamed the dew-lined
grass and walls. No pools yet swamped
the wash-house floor, no tap’s persistent drip wore hours away.’
Here he is joined by Nuts and Neddie, who
at the Academy, as at Cultybraggan, was Nuts’ principal adherent and
attendant. Meanwhile, ‘Fester
floundered up and down the hut, submerged in waves of dust and drifting fluff,
continually uttering cries abrupt or choked if broom or bucket missed some
speck of dirt.’ At half-past seven,
‘clutching tin mugs, plates and eating-tools,’ the huts’ inmates head off for
breakfast, which is provided in a large marquee or tent, where ‘two great
squares of bread were dealt to them, topped by two meagre blobs of marge and
jam,’ where ‘their plates were swilled with gruel, salty, thin, and stained
with obscene sausage, bacon, egg, which sickly in their stomachs mixed, washed
down by scented tea.’
After depositing his slops in garbage cans
outside the tent and scrubbing his plates and eating utensils in a kitchen
sink, Jake scans the notice-board. He
reads, ‘Platoon and Section in Attack this morning – lunch at 13.15 hours – Demonstration:
Night Patrol – at four, inspection – supper, 5.15 – in huts by 10.15 – lights
out at half-past ten.’ Next he visits
Neddie’s hut. ‘Metalled
boots and
bedsteads screeched on stone, directed here and there by Neddie’s cries
hysterical, part deafened by the din, upon his whim to line up every bed
symmetrical and straight. He jerked
around, nervous of an officer, saw Jake, and hailed him: “Oh!
Hallo! Quite sweaty – eh?” Distracted, back he whirled to put things
right: “Oo, but you mustn’t do that!
Move back – too much!” '
Jake and Neddie then visit Nuts’s
hut. ‘A decent atmosphere inspired his
hut, that seemed to hold the sunlight more than most. Nuts stretched his length along his bed, and
leaned upon an elbow … Around him grouped his subjects, shyly bold, whom he
amused with bantering and chaff, while they inconsequential tossed him
sweets.’ The three of them then seek
out Podge and Robbie. ‘The latter was a
wee, waistcoated thing, dapper, sleek, attired with suave perfection … His
glossy hair, combed flat, increased, it seemed, his boots’ black brilliance, as
varnish bright; his gentle pleading eyes became intent when furtively he
gleaned subversive talk.’ Podge, also
known as Caesar and the Emperor, was ‘a portly plutocrat among the proles,
still well-conditioned, fit, his solid white-skinned body in the pink, not gone
to pot … His jutting hair, pale-coloured, fiercely swept his forehead low and
little eyes … His voice, like grated cheese, twanged ominous.’ ‘Tee-hee,’ titters Robbie.
The next four days pass by in a blur of
military activity.
‘They toiled up hills: near Blairinroar,
like puffins ledged aslant on spray-wet rocks, they sat on heather tufts dewed
with a shower that swept the slopes and arched a rainbow over the glistening
glen. Sweatily they slogged on pebbled
roads, embarked on exercises, clearing woods, while over hedges brown-hide cows
cud chewed, steaming and giving odour.
They by-passed farms, like Tyghnablair … and cottages, whose wickets
green enclosed carnations creamy-frilled, Sweet Wiliiam, nasturtiums burnished
red and gold, and roses velvet, damson-hued, blue podded lupins, hollyhocks all
pollen-furred, and stock of varied pink and white and mauve perfumed. They crushed a path on steep Allt Tairbh’s
thick banks; they trampled tussocks on the moors, crushed sprouts of heather,
furze, and feathery bracken bent; and sheep, and hares, and grouse, avoided
them. Their bodies ached, then totally
relaxed … They dozed at demonstrations: armoured cars, patrols, machine-guns,
mortars, camouflage; they marched and drilled till socks stuck to their feet;
they queued for meals and famished ate each scrap. From rifle, foot, inspections once
dismissed, insatiable they thronged the cinema, unwearied gorged the NAAFI’s
groceries, and sang tremendous choruses untired, when malleable performers
could be found; or under naked lights they flicked their cards in general
disarray of shorts and shirts … Jake despondent grew; for sometimes now he saw
how they from citizens disrupted put on habits of the herd.’
On the Sunday there is a Church
Parade. ‘Rare slate-bellied clouds
trailed, ship-like, shadows over contours curving wide … Major Mac reviewed the
whole contingent … In column sized they stood erect. A drum-beat rapped – they tautened. Jake roared down the line: “Company! By the left! Quick march!” The bagpipes wailed, picked up their tune,
and forward stepped each man … They came back drowsed by holy monotones and
lunched religiously.’
The rest of Sunday is spent as individuals
wish, lounging about, driving off with parents, bird-watching, bussing into
Crieff, and using one of the stoves to make a feast of baked beans on toast. Jake, Nuts and Ron deal with this, assisted
by others, like Charles, Mike and Greg.
Pleasantries are exchanged and stories told and Nuts, who is taking over
from Jake as CSM, begins to dominate the scene. Jake is leaving a day early, on the Tuesday,
his birthday, to take part in a cricket match in England, on 4 July.
After supper most of that company assemble
in the NAAFI and Neddie is prevailed upon to play the piano and strum
accompaniments to grand old songs.
‘They bellowed, bawled, they sometimes sang,
and strove for glorious harmony. With
Jake to lead, they sang and ceased to be themselves, became a Voice, inspiring
primitive emotions in those who heard … with choruses to Moses, and John Brown,
Lloyd George, the Quarter-Master, Kirriemuir, and lastly to the
Hippopotamus.’ They then sing the
school song, Floreat Academia, before going outside for some Scottish country
dancing in a field. Pipers are summoned
and some officers and timid plebs turn up to watch. Jake invites Major Mac to be his partner and
Neddie dances with Puddle Ford, Podge with Robbie, and Ron with Nuts. Three circles form up to dance an eightsome.
‘A pine-tree, tall and bent, quite near
the field, upreared against the west an outline black; beyond it over Dunmore
Hill the flames of sunset faded: orange now, then crimson darkling flared; the dusky east
pricked forth a star, as evening ceded place to night. The dancers noticed not the gradual change,
save where reflected on their partner’s face, nor felt the midges bite, nor
thistles nettle. Fast they caught the
hand the arm that clutched and loosed their own, kept balance on the
grass. They stopped for rest, applauded
solo turns of pipes or Highland dance, and swung away again, the drone and
chant of bagpipes pierced with yells … Great gusto Jake and Neddie both
displayed, galumphing up and down in beastly glee; but Neddie more than Jake
did splendid bounds: he gambolled like a small monster, that gaily on Jurassic
shores in spring-time flicks its hind-legs blithe and vibrant on the sand.’
Major Mac brings the dancing to a close
and the dancers return to their huts, where Jake converses in the wash-house
with Ron and then with Nuts and Neddie.
After bidding each other good-night, they settle down in their
huts. Jake switches the lights out in his
hut and silences the raucous sallies and rude sniggers among his troops. He says to himself, ‘Tomorrow we’ll set out
and sweat again, attacking, purposeless, those damned great hills. What did Ron say? “They’ll still be here, enduring, when we’re
gone. But we endure as well. That’s what it’s all about.” Before dropping off to sleep Jake yawns and
murmurs to himself, ‘A place in the sun, at the end, is what one wants.’
The poem ends as it begins, with a
roll-call of place-names and the eternal silence of the hills. ‘Lonely came a bugle call: two notes in
unfulfilled sad cadence rose and stayed; a wall-tap in the wash-house ran
unseen incessant down the drain; the grasses, ferns, immobile as the weapons of
a war-lord laid aside, how they were left, they lay. And came a breeze, in darkness sifting
through the gorse and wide expanses of the hills. On Tyghnablair, and Blairinroar, Allt Tarbh
and Ruchill Water, rain began to fall.’
The original typescript is dated 22 March
1955, which is when I read it to the senior ephors in the Ephors’ Room, to
Nutty Walker, now Head Ephor, to John Gordon, Brian Neill, David
Gardner-Medwin, and AJ Munro. I stood and they sat around the table where
miscreants were walloped, and heard me through in silence. It was a rare event, for them, and for me –
an echo of what happened in ancient times, when a court poet or bard sang or
recited verses about their deeds and lineage to the king and his retainers
feasting in a hall.
The Edinburgh Festival was gathering
momentum now and getting bigger. From
its inception in 1948 I had seen one or more of the productions on display
every year. Hardly any do I remember
now, apart from seeing Paul Scofield in The River Line in 1952, and in the
first week of September 1954, an elaborate production of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream at the Empire Theatre, in which Robert Helpmann and Moira Shearer, as
Oberon and Titania, flew into the wings to the music of Mendelssohn. They
had both starred in that impressive and powerful film, The Red Shoes, which I
saw in 1948.
In the second week of September I went on
holiday with my cousin, Eileen Duncan.
Although she must have been in her late twenties, we had always got on
quite well, and had once climbed the hills behind Swanston together. She wasn’t intimidating, like most young
women, and was dark-haired, brown-eyed, and rather jolly, sturdy and blokey,
with a hearty laugh – a Fraser more than a Duncan.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but the holiday was strangely prophetic,
as it centred on Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford.
On the other hand, the Academy and my
mother may well have decided that I would enter an Oxford college as a
Commoner, in 1955 or 1957 -- before or after compulsory two years of National Service,
and provided that I passed an Entrance Examination. So it may have been deemed a good idea if I
had a look at Oxford in advance and, as I had acted in two plays by Shakespeare
and would be in a third, I might as well visit Stratford and see how professional
actors performed the plays.
Postcards written to my parents on
Saturday 11 September, reveal that Friday was showery and that after some
shopping Eileen and I went on a coach-trip of the Cotswolds, to Bourton-on-the
Water, where there was a scaled down model of the village. Here there was a large brown hairy pig in a
field and, as I would do whenever I saw a pig and had a camera, I took a photo
of it looking up at me. On the Saturday
morning we hired a double canoe and explored the upper reaches of the River
Avon, taking photos of swans and the parish church as seen from the river. Then
it was a tour by coach to Warwick and Kenilworth Castles. I wrote in a postcard that Warwick
had a great collection of paintings and that there were peacocks in the grounds
… ‘There was a thunderstorm while we lunched there, but by the time we reached
the huge red sandstone ruins of Kenilworth
Castle the sun was
streaming. Tonight there is Othello and
supper at the Theatre afterwards.’
Anthony Quayle, who was the director of
the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, as it was called then, played Othello. Little did I imagine, as I sat there gazing
at the stage, that less than four years later I would also play Othello, and
that eight years later I would be standing on that stage myself.
On the Sunday we visited the parish church
where Shakespeare was buried and viewed his minatory memorial. Like most people I was completely ignorant
about his life and times, and made no imaginative connection with the fact that
he had lived in Stratford and gone to school there, and that I was seeing some
of his plays there, two of which I had acted in, and had spoken the words that
he had written. That afternoon an excursion
to Welford was rained off and we returned to Stratford and did some more canoeing. On the Monday we walked on a fine, hot day
along a canal to Mary Arden’s house at Wilmcote, eight miles there and back,
and in the evening we saw The Taming of the Shrew, of which I recall nothing at
all. Many years later, in Perth, Western
Australia, I would appear as Gremio in an open-air
production of The Shrew in King’s Park.
Laurence Olivier was in the Stratford company that
season, appearing in Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus with Vivien
Leigh, the plays being directed, respectively, by John Gielgud, Glen Byam Shaw
and Peter Brook. Alan Webb and Ian Holm
were also in the company, the latter making his first professional appearance,
as Donalbain in Macbeth but mainly as a spear carrier -- as I would do in eight
years’ time. The Observer’s critic, Kenneth Tynan, while
praising Olivier’s widely praised performances, said that his wife’s Lady
Macbeth was ‘more niminy-piminy than thundery-blundery … but still quite
competent in its small way.’ Of her
showing in Titus he wrote, ‘As Lavinia, Vivien Leigh received the news that she
is about to be ravished on her husband’s corpse with little more than the mild
annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber.’ This calculatedly clever and amusing but
nasty remark (typical of some critics) was said of the Scarlett O’Hara of Gone
with the Wind, which had been premiered in Atlanta, Georgia in December 1939,
her performance winning an Oscar the following year (the film won 10 Oscars).
From Stratford,
Eileen and I then did a coach tour of Blenheim
Palace and some of the Oxford colleges. We didn’t go inside the Palace, which was
immensely grand and impressive, but wandered around the grounds, viewing the
gardens and the lake. At Oxford we
looked into five colleges, Magdalen, St Edmund Hall, Oriel, Corpus
Christi and University
College, where my
university education would begin in 1957.
My favourite college was Teddy Hall, because it was small and
homely. It also seemed really old and
had wisteria growing on its walls, as had the buildings in Lugano.
And then it was back to Edinburgh for the start of my last year at
the Academy, a year there that I enjoyed the most. I was 18 that September.
My
last appearance in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta was going to be as Private
Willis in Iolanthe. This was something
of a comedown after the Mikado, as there was even less to do, sing or say. Willis, like the Mikado, only appeared in
Act II. I had thought I might be chosen
to play Mountararat or Tolloller. But
Willis’s famous solo had the distinction of opening Act II, and as he was a
guardsman and wore a bearskin, I couldn’t help making an impression as I would
be seven feet tall.
Besides, I would be busy organising three
other events. The Division Music
Competitions and the Concert devolved on me that year, and from somewhere or
someone, probably Nutty Walker as Head Ephor, came the idea that a Free and
Easy Concert might also be staged. His father had also been Head Ephor at the
Academy and organised a Free and Easy.
This was an informal variety show in which boys who wouldn’t normally
appear on stage in school productions were given the chance to display any
musical or other talents they possessed. The last Free and Easy – they had usually
been organised by the senior ephors – had been 21 years ago.
So in the Winter Term I was preoccupied,
thinking about and planning future musical and dramatic events. Nonetheless, now that my class masters’ scholarship
expectations had faded away and I had been given a freer hand with what I was
studying and reading, what I did was better received.
Hook
wrote of my English work, ‘He has been more ready to give himself to his work
this term, but there is still something reluctant about the frequency and
volume of his output … I think his work may make some impression by its
authority or consequence of style, but the examiners will look in vain for
quickness of imagination, close knowledge, or intellectual resourcefulness.’ Bevan said, ‘He listens well but seems
reluctant to contribute his opinions to general class discussion. He is undoubtedly profiting from his wider
reading and the general quality and tone of his writing continues to
improve.’ The Rector agreed, writing
about the General Papers that had taken the place of History lessons, ‘There
has been an appreciable advance this term in the quality of his essays.’
In his Class Master’s Report, Hook said,
‘None of us has all the virtues, but I hope his will commend themselves to the Oxford examiners in
January.’ His wish would be
fulfilled.
It seems that I applied via the Academy
for an English Scholarship at Jesus College in Oxford, and
in early January I travelled down to London by
train and thence on to Oxford. After taking a taxi from the station to
Jesus I was lodged in a double room on the ground floor of the main quad, in a
sitting-room and bedroom, strangely colourless, dark and bare, which turned out
to be occupied during term time by a blind man. Books in Braille were lying about. The overhead light was dim, and the cold and
darkness of the depth of winter was what I remember of those few days spent
there. I ate in the college hall along
with the hundred or so other boys taking similar exams and compared notes with
my neighbours, as to where they were from and what their subjects were. But that was all. At night I read any notes I had with me and
books that were relevant to the morrow’s exams.
After the scholarship exams it
was back to wintry Edinburgh
and the start of the Spring Term.
I was unsuccessful in my application for
an English Scholarship at Jesus but was offered a place at the college as a
Commoner. Because my mother didn’t have
the money to pay for the three years of my further education at Oxford, the Academy then proposed that if I did my
National Service first – rather than after Oxford – I could be the recipient of a
Thomson Scholarship. This was an
arrangement between the Academy and University
College and was worth
about £100 a year. All I had to do to
receive it was to pass the Common Entrance Examination. The
Thomson Scholarship had been recently endowed in memory of KD Thomson (EA
1892-1905), killed in 1916 in WW1.
In 1954 the Scholarship had been taken up
by AJC (Cameron) Cochrane, who’d been Giuseppe in The Gondoliers as well as
Captain of the First XI. He had left
the Academy in 1952 and had done his National Service with the Royal Artillery
in Hong Kong (as I would do), and in 1954 had gone to University College
to read English (as I would do).
Cochrane had been in 45 Field Regiment in Hong Kong
as a subaltern (which I never was). He
went on to captain Univ at rugby and cricket and played for the university at
both games (which I wouldn’t do).
Ultimately he was headmaster of Fettes for nine years.
His three years at Oxford would conclude in 1957, which meant
that if I did my National Service from September 55 to September 57, I would
follow him
to Univ in
October 57. So my future academic
career was decided by the relevant powers-that-be in Edinburgh
and Oxford.
The Rector at the Academy, Robert Watt,
wrote to Giles Alington, the Senior Tutor at Univ, saying that the Academy
recommended that I would be the next suitable recipient of the Thomson
Scholarship and would come up to Oxford after I’d completed my National
Service. The Principal of Jesus also
wrote to Giles Alington, saying, ‘I should liked to have given him an
Exhibition, but he was not quite good enough in a strong year, and being a
Scotsman he has not the resources to take up a place as a Commoner which we
offered him. I gather that you have a
Close Award for boys from Edinburgh
and I merely write to say that he is, in my opinion, a delightful person.’ What, I wonder, did he mean by that? He
must have interviewed me. I didn’t know
about his letter until over 55 years later, and can’t imagine in what way I was
‘delightful’ then.
The Principal’s reference to me being a Scotsman
acknowledged the fact that no Scottish education authority would give any of
its sons any financial backing, or grant, to attend an English university. Nonetheless my mother was able to extract an
additional bursary from someone, somewhere (possibly the City of Edinburgh) of about £37 a
year.
I wasn’t consulted about any of this,
although I had expressed a preference for doing my National Service before
going to Oxford,
so that whatever I did thereafter would not be interrupted. As it was, this sequence of events, two
years of National Service and then four (interrupted) years at Univ, rather
than at Jesus, would determine much of what happened in the rest of my life –
as would the students I met at Univ rather than those at Jesus. And by doing my National Service first I
gained a measure of that maturity that the Academy masters thought I lacked.
The Spring Term of 1955 passed in
preparations for the musical events of the Summer Term. There were meetings and discussions with all
the boys involved, and many rehearsals.
At the same time I was filling in the gaps in my knowledge of literature
by reading the works of some of the metaphysical poets and a few of the novels
of Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Sterne and Virginia Woolf, though none by
Trollope. Those of DH Lawrence I read later.
By this time, although I still had weekly
lessons in Latin, French and English, the General Paper sessions had been
dropped and I had Free Periods virtually every day. This was utilised by the Librarian, Wilf
Hook, who got me and a few others to employ our spare time by marking, in white
ink, the spines of every book in the Library with initials and reference
numbers. This took some time, and
curiously presaged what I would be doing in my first few days of National
Service. To this day, there are books
in the Library that bear the marks I made.
It was, I think, during this term, that I
had weekly sessions with a tutor, who visited the Academy to instruct me in the
poems of the 17th century, like those written by John Donne, George
Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan and John Dryden. The ideas expressed in these poems were too
intellectual and clever for me, although I liked the poems of Donne and
Marvell. The tutor was a young man,
slim and fair, aged about 24, who had recently graduated at Cambridge.
We met in an empty class room. I
was somewhat inhibited by this intimacy and by the fact that he sometimes came
and sat beside me. He invited me to
visit him at his nearby flat for further conversations, but I was suspicious
about his motives and declined the invitation. I also didn’t fancy socialising with a
teacher.
It was at the end of this term, on 22
March, that I was invited to read Jake to the assembled senior ephors in the
Ephors’ Room. Jake had of course left
the school the previous summer and I sent him a copy.
I travelled down to Oxford a few days later, to sit the Univ
Entrance Exam on 24/25 March 1955. By
then the weather was less dark and cold and Univ made a better impression on me
than Jesus. I also made a good
impression, although I was nervous, on the dons who interviewed me in the
Senior Common Room after the Exams, which included two General Papers, an Unseen,
and a Science Paper. These must have
covered subjects to do with English and History, as well as Latin. I was awarded the following marks – A, AB,
BA, B, BC and C. These, as well as my
GCE O and A Level results, were noted on an aide-memoire used by the five or
six interviewers, one of whom was my future English tutor, Peter Bayley. He commented at the bottom of the page,
‘Very, very tall. Is nice.’ Another don scrawled, ‘Wrote an epic.’ Across the page someone wrote, in red
crayon, ‘Accept.’ A letter to this
effect was sent to Robert Watt at the Academy on 28 March.
In my Spring Term report Wilf Hook wrote,
‘He has not been hard pressed this term.
His reading has been rather more general, and his essays and comments
show maturing understanding.’ Bevan
said, ‘With the pressure of examinations removed, he seems to be producing much
better written work.’ In French and
Latin I was said to be ‘competent’ and ‘capable’ and the Rector concluded, ‘His
wide range of interests is now finding scope & he is learning to use his
time effectively – the most valuable lesson a future undergraduate can learn.’
The Summer Term was my last at the Academy
and witnessed the full flowering of some of my talents and interests. It was not exactly an apotheosis, but there
was glory of a sort.
I hardly did any school work as there was
so much to prepare and rehearse. But on
Saturdays I sometimes took a tram down to New Field to enjoy the archetypal
sight and sound of the First XI, captained by Nutty Walker, playing cricket on
an idyllic summer’s day – the thwack of bat on ball and the running of figures
in white between the wickets and when chasing a ball. Once I performed the duties of a
scorer. I knew everyone there and they
all knew me. I viewed the dream-like scene
with a certain sadness, aware that my schooldays were coming to an end and that
the vague awfulness of adult life would soon overwhelm me.
The ‘School Notes’ in the EA Chronicle,
written in November 1955, commented, ‘The cold but dry month of May was the
prelude to a glorious summer. At the
start of this Term the Fields were almost too hard for Rugger owing to the
continued drought … Unusual events last term included the sight of the senior ephors
taking the School PT Parade at 11.15 during Sgt Major McCarron’s illness … and
the revival of the “Free and Easy” ’.
The Notes congratulated those of us who had won various
Scholarships. D Gardner-Medwin had been
awarded a State Scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge,
and I was congratulated ‘on being awarded the Thomson Scholarship, a Close
Scholarship from the Academy to University
College, Oxford.’
At the beginning of the Summer Term I was
promoted at last to Corporal, and on Thursday, 30 June, the inter-house Platoon
Competition, an annual event, was held at the Academy and at a Gorebridge
farm. As reported in the Chronicle our
military capabilities, including drills, were tested by serving officers and an
RSM of the Royal Scots. Houses, led by
PSM Kindness, won the Competition, and my division, Carmichael, was third.
There was much mention of my name elsewhere
in this issue of the Chronicle, which didn’t appear until the following term.
Firstly, in chronological order, there was
my performance in Iolanthe, presented in the School Hall for four nights, from
1 to 4 June, and directed by Mr and Mrs Hempson. The main parts were all played by boys younger
than me, none of whom was an associate or a friend. But in the Chorus of Peers, apart from three
of the masters, were Gardner-Medwin, KH Murcott, RM Sinclair and IDM Chalmers
(more about him later). None of the
boys who were in the Chorus of Fairies was known to me unless they were in the
School Choir. But the Fairy Queen, GAE
(Giles) Gordon would become known to me in very different circumstances when as
a publisher’s editor he turned down my first novel.
He was a short and sturdy, rather scruffy
schoolboy with a brush of hair and a scrubbed look -- a most unlikely-looking
fairy, let alone a Fairy Queen. He went
through the motions but he was obviously very uncomfortable in the part and
especially when he had to express his suppressed feelings for me as Private
Willis. He had to say, ‘Do you suppose
that I am insensible to the effect of manly beauty? … Now here is a man whose
physical attributes are simply god-like.
That man has a most extraordinary effect upon me. If I yielded to a natural impulse, I should
fall down and worship that man. But I
mortify this inclination.’
At the end of the operetta the Fairy Queen
has to marry Willis and turns him into ‘a fairy guardsman’. Wings sprouted from my shoulders, as they
did from the Chorus of Peers, and in the Finale the whole cast sang ‘Everyone
is now a fairy’ and we all danced. This
was the bit that GAE Gordon and I liked least of all as he was a rotten dancer
and we had to hold hands.
At the Curtain Call I stepped forward and,
reading partly from notes, made a speech thanking all those involved in the
production.
AD came up from Prestwick from Edinburgh to see the last
school production in which I would appear.
She wrote, ‘In his guardsman’s uniform, with scarlet tunic and bearskin,
which considerably increased his height, he presented a handsome and colourful
picture. He was alone on stage at the
start of Act Two and his solo was rendered in a strong baritone voice. I was pleased and proud of his
performance.’ I hope that both my
parents were there, as well as Marion and Jim, but I don’t remember whether
they were.
AD returned to Edinburgh to see the Division Music
Competitions and Concert on Wednesday, 20 July. She wrote that I conducted ‘the large school
choir without a trace of nervousness and with a confidence that surprised and
pleased me.’ Again, I hope that my
parents were also there, but again, I don’t recall if they were.
In the Music Competitions I conducted the
Carmichael Choir. The tricky test song,
sung by all four Divisional choirs, was ‘Diaphenia’ by CV Stanford. There was also an Instrumental Competition,
which included a composition specifically written by me for the best
instrumentalists that Carmichael had, for
violin, cello, clarinet, flute and piano.
I played the piano; Bill Nicoll the clarinet. My composition was called ‘Theme and
Variations’ and was simple, tuneful and not too fast, so that we could all keep
up and not make too many mistakes. It
was up against a Rondo by Mozart, a Serenade by Schubert, and a Minuet by
William Boyce, played by a trio and two quartets. The adjudicator was Mr Herrick Bunney.
The Chronicle’s reviewer said, ‘The vocal
competition was won for the second year running by a sound performance from
Carmichael, in which the only material flaw was an occasional slight flatness
in the treble line … All the instrumental entries were well worth hearing, and
Carmichael once again produced a Kapellmeisterwerk by Honeycombe; but the most
musical and well-integrated combination was beyond doubt that of Kinross.’ Kinross won; Carmichael
was second.
In the Concert that followed the interval,
I conducted the two choirs, large and small, and chose, after seeking advice
about this, what they might sing – the Welcome Chorus by Bach from Phoebus and
Pan, and the Faery Chorus from The Immortal Hour by Rutland Boughton. The Madrigal Choir sang ‘April is in my
Mistress’ face’ by John Morley. The
solo pianist, Fergus Harris’s younger brother, AL Harris, the instrumental
quartet and the trio, all chose what they wanted to play. I played the piano for MJS Chesnutt, who
sang (my choice as it was a slow number) ‘Solveig’s Song’ from Peer Gynt by
Greig.
Chesnutt was a sweet-faced small boy with
dark hair – a smaller version of me, I suppose, at that age -- and I thought he
would enchant the female members of the audience. He didn’t enchant the reviewer, nor did my
choice of ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ as the final item in the programme.
The reviewer wrote, ‘After so satisfactory
a first half to the evening the audience were in an expectant mood, and their
expectations were not disappointed.
There were two miscalculations … It would have been a miracle if
Mozart’s intimate and intensely devotional “Ave Verum” had made an appropriate
ending to such an occasion, and with all respect for Chesnutt’s brave effort,
no boy of twelve can realise the mature and essentially feminine emotions of
Solveig’s song …’ He was right in both
instances. He continued, ‘The combined
choir had been admirably trained by Honeycombe, not only in the technique of
their business but in what a famous Academical once called “the great task of
happiness”; and the small choir sang
some beautiful and exacting music with a competence only slightly qualified by
a certain thinness in the alto part.’
I conducted without a baton and was pleased that the choirs and other
performers hadn’t let themselves down, nor me.
Many years later I learned that little
Chesnutt had a crush on me. I was
completely unaware of this. He was just
another small boy, though more neatly dressed than most and with a nice face.
Three days later, on Saturday, 23 July, the
Free and Easy took over the school hall.
It began at eight o’clock and lasted, with an interval, for three hours. While congratulating the Head Ephor, Nutty
Walker, and myself, ‘the chief organiser’, for putting on the show, the
Chronicle’s reviewer opined, rightly, that it ‘suffered from lack of rehearsal
and would have been much improved if almost every item had been reduced in
length.’
There were 15 items in the programme and
if the performers had stuck to the 10-minute slots they were given we might
have come in under 2½ hours (with an interval). But virtually every item overran, partly
because groups were slow getting on the stage and getting off, and once on they
indulged themselves. The trouble was
that I hadn’t seen any of the acts in full, or in costume. The Ben Dorain Choral Union, in recreating
their nights on mountaineering expeditions, sitting around a mock fire, enjoyed
themselves so much that they went on singing for twice as long as their
allotted time. In the wings I was going
berserk, agitatedly waving at them and mouthing ‘Get off!’ To no avail.
Some of the groups had comic names, like
‘Cotton Walker on his syncopated Squeeze-Box’, ‘The Florence Chapeau Trio’, and
‘Hop Scotch Fowlie and his Small Scotch Trio’.
JS Fowlie was one of the
masters. A boy called Melrose,
made-up and costumed like a flapper (his idea) and calling himself Miss
Semolina Smog, sang and danced a daring Charleston. Drag was also adopted by Puddle Ford, posing
as a Victorian lady, Miss Florrie Att.
The
last item in the Free and Easy was a take-off of The Goon Show, written by me
and called Neddie Seagoon’s Schooldays, which was stuffed with sound effects,
musical and otherwise, and well-known catch-phrases. It starred John Gordon as Neddie, GC Averill
as Eccles, Fergus Robertson as Bluebottle, AG McGregor as Moriarty, and myself
as Minnie Crun – as an offstage voice.
The Announcer was DM Baxendine.
After ‘God Save the Queen’ the Free and
Easy began. The Chronicle’s review of
it was a full one and very fair.
‘After a rousing opening Chorus by the
School Ephors, resplendent in straw hats, striped blazers and white flannels
and brandishing brand-new clackens, RG Honeycombe and AL Stewart sang ‘The Two
Gendarmes’ and CTK Walker performed on the accordion. Dr
Isaac, in a magnificent beard, then gave a delightful piano recital “Ancient
Welsh Psalm Tunes” (so-called) and became involved in mysterious operations
with Messrs Booth and Marshall. EM
Sandland showed his skill on the piano, GF Melrose danced the Charleston, and a harmonica trio produced
more music. Then came “The Florence
Chapeau Trio,” featuring “Miss Florrie Att, Mus. Spin, (piano forte); Herr Mata
Peah (recorder) and Hank Amamus, Esq. (cor français).” Messrs Ford, B Cook and Dawson (almost)
recognisable behind a Victorian façade, gave a moving rendering of a period
ballad “Ring the bell softly, there’s crape on the door.” After this there followed, in complete
contrast, “Happy-Cat-Kemp and his Hot-Time-Tom-Cats.” When they ceased “hitting the high spots,”
the exhausted audience welcomed an interval and some fresh air.’
The senior ephors chorus, written by me,
was a version of the Peers chorus in Iolanthe – ‘Bow, bow, ye lower middle
classes! Bow, bow, ye plebs, ye proles,
ye masses! Cringe before us! Grovel and adore us! Tantantara!
Tzing boom!’ The duet sung by AL
Stewart and myself, ‘A conductor’s lot is not a happy one.’ was a variation, by
me, on another G & S song. Stewart
had been Strephon in Iolanthe and had conducted Kinross in the Music
Competitons. With conductors’ batons in
our hands we sang, ‘When the tenors go to sleep and sing soprano – Sing
soprano. And the altos lose their wits
and join the bass – Join the bass. When
they should be singing loud and will sing piano – Will sing piano. The result is very far from commonplace.’
These songs, with lyrics by me, were the
first, along with my first play, Neddie Seagoon’s Schooldays, to be given
public performances.
Part Two of the show was described by the
Chronicle’s man thus: ‘The programme
began with an invasion of the Hall by what appeared at first sight to be a gang
of ruffians but who turned out to be “The Ben Dorain Choral Union.” After these “hill-billies” had taken the
“Road to the Isles” and departed, the Head Ephor and his second-in-command, JW
Gordon, followed the old Free and Easy tradition by singing a “Topical Song,”
recounting in verse the features of the past year.’ This they wrote themselves. ‘The same pair then sang the “Hippopotamus
Song,” the audience joining with immense enthusiasm in the chorus of “Mud! Mud!
Glorious Mud!” A Foursome Reel
by the Academy Highland Dancing Team, some music by the Country Dance Band,
with Mr Fowlie in charge, and a Sword Dance, led up to the “world premiere” of
a “gigantic” production, bearing some resemblance to a popular radio programme
… This had a cast of about two dozen, several scenes, various impersonations,
numerous topical allusions, and a finale in which (as was only right and
proper) the School Ephors restored order where chaos had been raging … With,
appropriately, “Miss Florrie Att” presiding at the “ grand organ” the evening’s
entertainment had finally reached a triumphant conclusion.’
Despite the show’s length and its failings,
it was much enjoyed by all those who were there. It also made me realise that I could not
only perform adequately on stage but organise and direct large-scale stage
productions, as I would do at Oxford
and in later years. But it was as a
writer that I hoped to make a mark. I dreamed of being famous. But how might this happen?
It was in the mid-fifties that I
formulated a mantra instead of a prayer that I repeated to myself before going
to sleep – ‘I’m going to be a great success, my work will be immortal.’ Even then I had begun to believe that the
mind has a controlling influence of not just the body but your well-being,
outlook, attitudes and very existence.
My years at the Academy concluded at the
Exhibition held in the School Hall on the afternoon of Monday, 25 July 1955, at
which I received the Douglas English Prize (The Works of Sir Thomas Malory),
and an ER Balfour Music Prize (Poems & Songs of Robert Burns). The Malory would be put to good use when I
dramatised part of it as Lancelot and Guinevere, which was broadcast on Radio 4
in January 1976 and in September 1980 was staged at the Old Vic. I still have these books, as well as five others
I received in previous years.
It was the custom during the Exhibition
for the Rector to review the sporting and scholastic events and achievements of
the year. The latter included the Scholarships to Cambridge won by HG
(Harry) Usher, who was Dux, by AJ Munro and Bill Nicoll. FHD Walker (Nutty -- his Christian name was
Francis) won an Exhibition in Mathematics to Clare College. The Rector also mentioned that ‘there are
some good Commoners going to Oxford.’ Individual successes in games and other activities
were delineated and Nutty Walker’s leadership and example praised in full. He was
ultimately Captain of Everything – rugby, cricket and athletics, as well as CSM
and Head Ephor. To my pleased but
blushing amazement the Rector spoke about me twice. Were my parents present to hear what he
said? I hope so.
He said, ‘It is sad to reflect that the
famous soliloquy of Private Willis was the swansong in legitimate drama of one
who has held the Academy stage for so many years and in such a variety of
towering parts, RG Honeycombe. To the
many participants and helpers, visible and invisible, he paid eloquent tribute,
and I can only invite you here to applaud the skill, the patience and the tact
with which so complex a collection were handled to such admirable effect by Mr
and Mrs Hempson.’
The Rector went on to comment on the
initiative and organising abilities of those boys who were involved in new
ventures and the Divisional Music Competitions and the Concert. He said, ‘This year the conductor, not
content with a performance of good Home Service quality went on to organise a
variety show on a Light Programme model, a revival of the long-defunct but once
prosperous “Free and Easy.” Our collars
might wilt, but the energy and vivacity of the performers never flagged. Sounds
harmonious and cacophonous, on every type of instrument and every register of
the human voice, dances domestic and dances of alien origin, strange operations
and familiar phrases, provided a remarkable medley culminating in the triumph
of virtue over vice. No doubt the
versatility of the producer derives from his study of the first Elizabethan
age. When he returns from Army life,
enriched and matured by experiences which most Elizabethans shared, Honeycombe,
our Thomson Scholar to University College, Oxford, will contribute much to its
revels, as he has to our entertainment.’
This was praise indeed, and what he said
so positively about my future activities in Oxford actually came to pass. In his final comments in my School Report,
the Rector wrote, ‘His exceptional height inevitably marks him out from the
common throng & his zest for dramatic activity has brought him frequently
& to good effect into the limelight … His enterprise & enthusiasm have
contributed much to our entertainments, in music and drama; the coming years of
Army life will test to the full his adaptability and tolerance. Development of these qualities will fit him
well for the intellectual stimulus of Oxford
work & Oxford
discussions, in which I wish him a happy & successful career.’
Wilf Hook concluded, typically snide, ‘His
mind is less that of a scholar than of an artist, and we do not expect our
artists to be at all points well adjusted to life! I hope he will have an interesting and
successful career.’
It turned out to be a career unforeseen by
anyone, least of all by me.
But then there was the CCF Camp. That summer it was at Fort George,
Ardesier, in Inverness-shire. Now that
I was a Corporal and a junior ephor and had been publicly singled out for
special mention in the Rector’s address, I felt a modicum of pride in leading
the column as right marker from the school’s Yards to Waverley Station, behind
the Pipe Band and our CSM, Nutty Walker.
At 8.05 am on 26 July we paraded in the
School Yards and marched up to Waverley Station. At the station we entrained for Inverness –
the journey took 6½ hours -- and were then transported to Fort George,
where we were housed in tents on a large grassy area before the Fort.
The Chronicle reported, ‘Training began
lightly with demonstrations by Eaton Hall Officer Cadets on Platoon
composition, Platoon in attack, and night patrols. The lessons learnt were put into practice by
carrying out several Platoon attacks in the afternoon. The training areas were ideal except that,
owing to the drought, they tended to catch fire rather easily; indeed, one of
the highlights was a heather fire which, at times, had two fronts each of 400
yards; Saturday afternoon was devoted to extinguishing it. Platoon in defence, the 2-inch mortar, house
clearing, map-reading and “Exercise Sniper” were all practised … The night
exercise was favoured by good weather and was a distinct success. On Monday, a map-reading exercise, with the
youngest cadets doing the work, brought the four divisional platoons to the
eastern boundary of the training area for a haversack lunch … A realistic and
successful Company in attack was performed on the Tuesday morning. On Sunday we attended Service in the Fort Chapel. Over the weekend we were pleased to have
visits from the Rector and Mrs Watt, and from Mr MH Cooke and Mr West. The success of Camp depends largely on the
food and the weather. This year we were
extremely lucky with both and were also able to enjoy good bathing in the Moray Firth. We
returned overnight, arriving at Waverley at 6.30
am, and duly disturbed Edinburgh
with our pipes.’
I remember very little of the above,
except that it was warm and sunny and that one of the overweight cadets was
said to have been black-balled, literally – his testicles smeared with black
boot polish. I dimly recall the
heather fire and the overnight train journey at the end. I would not have been one of those who went
for a swim in the icy waters of the Firth.
In my tent I was with about another eight
or ten corporals and sergeants, one of whom was John Gordon. But for those of us whose time at the
Academy had ended there was little interest in our amateur military activities
when two years of National Service loomed over us. Not
only that, everything and everyone we had known while we were at school, and
everything we had done and achieved, was fading away and becoming meaningless,
while our futures were largely a blank, a new dawn, a dawn of nothing.
Fort George,
however, was an interesting place. It
was a big and sprawling 18th century star-shaped fortress, built
after the Jacobite rising of 1745 to check and suppress any further trouble
from the Scottish clans. It stood on a windy, treeless promontory
jutting out into the Moray Firth, and its
nucleus of three-storey barrack-like buildings was entered by a narrow bridge
across a dry moat. At the weekend I
wandered along the grassed tops of the extensive bastions surrounding the fort,
sat down, and in a melancholy mood contemplated the steely waters of the Firth
and the blue hills beyond them and wondered what would happen next.
Nutty Walker, who left us a day or so
before we returned to Edinburgh,
to play cricket for the Edinburgh Academicals, visited our tent to say goodbye
to John Gordon. He also shook my hand,
and smiled, broadly and warmly. For
me, it would be a very long goodbye.
We were polar opposites in our
achievements – he was the Captain of Everything, and I was in effect the
Captain of Everything Else. All we had
in common was the fact that we were virtually the same height and the same
age. ‘In amity disparity revealed,’ as
I said in a sonnet. Words, however,
were insufficient to describe how I felt about him -- the strong emotion, the impossible,
inexpressible liking. Only once was I alone with him, and that was
when I took him through his songs for the Free and Easy in a small basement
room in the Masters’ Lodge where there was an upright piano, where Mr Howells
had given me lessons. He stood very
near me and I sat. It might have been a
very warm day, because his face became quite flushed, as mine did I
expect. The atmosphere in the room seemed
supercharged, so much so that I couldn’t continue, stood up and said, ‘That’s
fine. That’ll do.’ I looked at him and he looked at me and
nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said and went
away.
I felt very low and sorrowed for a long
time. I wouldn’t see him again for 44
years, not until the 175th anniversary dinner of the Edinburgh Academy held at the school on 1 October
1999. He looked and sounded much the
same, except that he was bald, like me.
He smiled, broadly and warmly, shook my hand, and said, in his strong
and mellow voice, ‘Hello, Ron.’
Back in Edinburgh, AD visited us in Great King Street
more than once. She wrote in her
Memories, ‘Ronald was now over 18 years of age and eligible to be called up for
his two years’ compulsory National Service, along with a number of classmates. They were all awaiting their call-up papers
with mixed feelings; some were eager to begin their training; others, like
Ronald, were less enthusiastic … He did not exactly relish the prospect of the
next two years being spent in military training, but was philosophical about it
… I can recall seeing one of the young boys, John Gordon, come bounding up the
stairs of the Great King Street flat, his face flushed with excitement, to tell
Ronald that his call-up papers had arrived and that he would be leaving home
the following week to report for duty.
Listening to their animated conversation and with memories of two world
wars behind me, I ardently hoped that all this training would never have to be
used for anything other than peacetime activities.’
In fact it was. National Service, which had been scrapped at
the end of WW2, was reimposed in January 1949 for a period of 18 months, and
extended to two years in October 1950 because of the Korean War. 204 National Servicemen were killed in that war
and others later on in Malaya, Suez, Aden and Cyprus,
where John Gordon did his NS. Out of
over one million young men who served from 1948 to 1963, 395 were killed in
combat situations. National Service
ended on 31 December 1960, the very last National Serviceman being discharged
in May 1963.
It was now my turn to serve. When summoned in August 1955 to a local
branch of the Ministry of Labour in Edinburgh
for a preliminary assessment, which included an interview, some basic aptitude
tests and a medical, I applied for the Royal Navy, not wishing to be in the
infantry and in direct contact with an enemy.
But this was not possible as I
was short-sighted. So I opted for the
Royal Artillery, as guns were positioned well to the rear of any actual hand-to-hand
fighting and I would probably not have to shoot or bayonet anyone or be shot at
in return.
Out of that decision – and it was a
decision made not by others but by me --much resulted, not just during the next
two years, but in much that happened in the years that lay ahead.
A week or so before my 19th
birthday my enlistment notice arrived in a brown War Office envelope,
containing a travel warrant and various instructions telling me to report to a
Royal Artillery training regiment at a place called Oswestry in Shropshire. I set
off gloomily, with a sinking feeling, into the Great Unknown.
7. OSWESTRY
and WOOLWICH, 1955-56
I entrained on the morning of 29
September 1955, a Wednesday, two days after my nineteenth birthday.
I was seen off by my mother and father at
smoky, clamorous Waverley Station, facing a blank two years and clutching a
bag, in which were mainly socks and underwear, handkerchiefs and toiletries and
things for keeping me warm. A paper bag
would have contained some wrapped sandwiches and an apple, and perhaps a bar of
chocolate or a Mars bar, as I mustn’t go hungry and had to maintain my
strength. For the journey was a long
one, lasting about six hours, and it would mean changing trains twice, at
stations I had never seen before. I was entering an unknown part of England as well
as an unknown life.
My father, wearing a hat and a coat and
glasses, and looking smaller and thinner and older, wasn’t well. But no one had told me what was wrong with
him, and I never asked. No doubt he
shook hands with me, his only surviving son, and perhaps he patted my arm and
called me “Ronald boy” as was his wont. I would have given my mother a peck on her
cheek. As a family we never
embraced. No one did in those
days. Only mothers and aged female
relatives received an occasional kiss.
Any display of physical intimacy, even among married couples, was very
rare.
The Army’s travel warrant gave me a seat
in a Third Class carriage. There was no
Second Class, the designation having been abolished many years ago, about
1900. There was only First and Third
Class now. But nine months later Third
Class ceased to exist, when it was renamed Second Class.
With four people sharing a long seat with
no arm-rests, Third Class compartments forced people into unwelcome physical
contact, with shoulders, arms or elbows touching. It was best to tuck yourself into a seat by
the window, where you might avoid contact with your neighbour and be able to
gaze at the passing countryside.
People-watching passed the time, as did trying to read the backs of
others’ newspapers, or the titles of books and the contents of magazines. Most men smoked in those days, and the train
compartments, in which as many as eight people sat facing each other, four on
each side, were generally overheated and the windows dirty. It was always a matter of dispute or
discussed agreement as to whether the latched window in the compartment door
should be shut or partly open and whether the slotted window above the main
window should be open or shut.
Racketing thunderously through dark and smokily acrid tunnels required
that all windows should be closed. If
you looked out of any window, especially a corridor window, you were likely to
get a painful piece of smoke-stack grit in an eye.
The journey would have necessitated
changing trains at Carstairs, where I joined the express from Glasgow
to London Euston, and then again at Crewe. At Crewe, a major railway junction, there
were connections with train services from all over Britain. At Crewe I
would have noticed numbers of other pale, skinny and solemn youths singly
boarding the train that would take us all to our common doom. It wasn’t as if we had to walk the plank or
face a firing squad, but there was a fearful uncertainty about the hereafter,
about what would happen. We had been
cocooned by family life and now, released into the wild, wide world we were on
our own
The train I boarded at Crewe left the main
line at Gobowen and chugged its way in a southwesterly direction through the
autumnal countryside to the town of Oswestry,
which was in Shropshire, along a line that
doesn’t exist now, having been closed in the 1960s.
If
I had known that Oswestry, some five miles from the Welsh border, had been an
ancient settlement, with an Iron Age hill-fort nearby, a thousand-year-old
church, some remnants of castle ruins, and the site of a battle in 642 AD
between kings of the Dark Ages, Oswald and Penda, I might have looked about
with some interest. Offa’s Dyke wasn’t
far away. But when I arrived all I saw
was a large brick railway station, and vociferous men in uniform, and Army
lorries waiting to take us away. In
that long ago Dark Age battle, Oswald, who became a saint, was slain and
dismembered, his right arm reputedly being carried by an eagle to an ash tree,
where miracles were later said to have occurred. Oswald’s Tree became Oswestry in due
course.
The area had for centuries been a base
and battle-ground for thousands of warring soldiers. In the twentieth century, although sportsmen
were its most famous sons, one was the young soldier-poet, Wilfred Owen, who
was killed in World War One, seven days before the end of the World War One. The town was now a training ground for the
Royal Regiment of Artillery at Park Hall Camp and had been so since before WW2,
accommodating over 2,000 men. Park Hall
itself, taken over by the Army before WW1, had once been a magnificent Tudor
mansion, until it was destroyed by fire in 1918.
Herded
into lorries like sheep, we headed, dumbly regarding each other, to the 17th
Training Regiment of the Royal Artillery, where we would be penned for the next
eight weeks.
Park Hall Camp was outside the town, a
dreary treeless place of huts and long low wooden buildings. In one we queued up to be identified and
registered by a clerk, to sign on and sign the Official Secrets Act. We were
given a number and the name of our Battery, which in my case was 148 (Meiktila)
Battery, 68 Regiment RA. A Battery
was the equivalent of a Company, which normally had three platoons. In our case they were called sections, or
squads. I was put in 6 Section, 148 Battery, which contained 36 squaddies in all. My NS number, never to be forgotten, was
23184340.
Wherever we went thenceforth we formed a
queue. We were always queuing, when not
doing drills or marching, sometimes at the double. There were cook-house queues, NAAFI queues,
queues to see an MO, queues to see lectures, to get anything and to see anyone
official, even to enter a toilet or use a urinal or basin in the
wash-house. Queuing had become a
national pastime during WW2, especially when rationing began. Rationing had only ended the previous year,
in July 1954, meat being the last item to be de-rationed, along with
cheese. Tea had been rationed until
1952, sugar and eggs till 1953. Our
families had become used to hardships and postwar shortages and so, unknowingly,
had we.
After the signing on, a Lance-Bombardier
(L/Bdr), reshaped us into a squad and marched us off to the QM (Quarter-Master)
stores, where we were required to stuff a kitbag with all our Army gear, which
included two battledress uniforms, best and second best, two pairs of boots,
best and second best, an Army greatcoat, three khaki shirts, two pairs of dark
green underpants (early versions of boxer shorts), three pairs of thick grey
socks, two pairs of PT shorts, two vests, one red, one white, a pair of striped
pyjamas, two black berets, two badges, two pairs of gaiters, two webbing belts,
backpacks and other webbing, and a set of overalls. A mess-tin, a white tin mug and a metal
knife, fork and spoon, called ‘eating irons’, were also issued to each of us,
as were a WW2 helmet and a gasmask, neither of which, I think, was ever
worn.
The cook-house and the NAAFI were pointed
out and, heavily laden, 36 of us were marched off to our spiders, as our
one-floor only, wooden barrack rooms were known.
Our section was divided up between two
spiders, six spiders (the hypothetical legs of a spider) sharing one
wash-house, consisting of 24 basins, showers, urinals and toilets, lit overhead
by low-strength naked bulbs. As about
18 home-sick, bleary conscripts occupied each spider, over 100 of us had to
hover and queue every early morning to shave and perform our wash-house
ablutions. Most of the chained plugs
in the basins had disappeared, so you had to provide your own, or stuff toilet
paper in the plug-hole.
Beds in each spider were allocated in
alphabetical order and faced each other in two parallel rows. There were no floor coverings, and on the
walls there were posters concerning weapons, regimental orders and fire precautions. The windows had no curtains and I think
there was no heating, although any heating wouldn’t have been operating until
December. I seem to remember that a
highly polished but unused black stove gleamed at us at one end, near the
door. Also adjacent to the door was a
partitioned cubicle, in which our very own Lance/Bombardier lived and
lurked. But whether he was awakened at
6.30 am, like us, or went to bed, like us, when the lights were switched off at
10.00 pm, I do not know. Nor did he use
our wash-house.
I have an end-of-training photo of 6
Section, lined up in three rows, the first row seated. We look tolerably presentable and cheerful,
though most berets are too high and show too much forehead. As usual I’m in the middle of the back
row. The faces I remember, but not the
squaddies’ names, apart from that of a Scottish lad, Hendry. Very few of them, I think, had been to a
public school. The names of the L/Bdr
and the Sergeant in charge of us also escape me. Seated in the middle of the group they were
slim, pleasant young men in their twenties, and didn’t abuse us
unnecessarily. Both were also doing
their National Service.
That
first evening our L/Bdr must have given us various instructions concerning
Royal Artillery routine and discipline – like saluting every officer and
reading the Orders of the Day on notice-boards every day -- and the making up
and stripping of the coverings on our narrow iron beds, which few if any of us
had ever done before, having left such menial activities to our mothers.
Four blankets, two sheets and two pillows
were provided for each bed, as was a thin mattress. Every morning the entire bed had to be
stripped, and three of the blankets and the two sheets folded neatly and
precisely. The fourth blanket had to be
wrapped around them, making a layered oblong sandwich at the head of the bed,
with the pillows on top. Everything had
to be squared off, including the backpacks, which were stuffed with newspapers
and lined with cardboard and had to be stowed, along with our helmets, on top
of a metal locker, which stood between the beds. My mania for squaring things off and lining
things up probably dates from this time.
The bed-making instructions and a
demonstration thereof probably happened after we were marched off by our L/Bdr
at 6.0 pm for a meal, called Tea, in the cook-house, having been instructed to
hold our eating utensils in our right hands behind our backs, while swinging
our left arms shoulder-high. The mid-day meal, lunch, was called Dinner. Tea would
have consisted of bread and jam, a rock cake, fried fish, potatoes and peas,
and a mug of tea untapped from a large tea-urn. The tea was allegedly doctored with
something called bromide, which was supposed to curb any impulse for
self-abuse, as well as any lustful feelings we might have for any female, or
even for each other. Exhaustion, lack
of funds, of privacy and opportunity were more debilitating than any bromide.
After Tea, our implements had to be
swilled and washed under a tap above a round vat of greasy water outside the
cook-house.
A visit to the NAAFI may have followed
this, as we had been instructed to buy tins of Brasso and Kiwi polish for
cleaning our kit, as well as yellow dusters, and olive-green oval blocks of
Blanco No 1, which when wetted would be brushed onto and into our webbing. All that would have cost 3s 9d. We had also been told to write to our
parents to let them know we had arrived at our destination. Plain post-cards had accordingly to be
bought, as well as stamps.
That
night we were worn out as well as miserable.
Someone further down the hut was softly sobbing.
In the morning, while it was still dark,
we were rudely woken by the Orderly Sergeant, switching on the lights and rapping
his cane on the rails at the foot of our beds and yelling the time-honoured
phrase, ‘Hands off cocks, feet in socks!’ among other orders and
imprecations. He might also have hurled
one of the metal buckets marked FIRE down the length of the hut. It was 6.00 am and we had to be shaved,
washed and dressed and ready at 6.30 to be marched to the cookhouse for
breakfast. Afterwards, we were allowed
to make our own way back to our spider.
At meal-times an excessively smart young
‘one pip’, a second lieutenant, would sometimes appear and swagger among the
tables inquiring genially if the food was all right. We never dared to criticise or complain,
feebly saying, ‘Yes, sir. Good, sir.’
Back at our spider all our civvy clothes
had now to be parcelled up and sent home, except our shoes. Sheets of brown paper were provided and
balls of string. We belonged to the
Artillery now, and were confined to barracks for two weeks. There was no escape.
We were then marched off to have a crude
regulation Army hair-cut – short, back and sides. This meant more queuing, as there were only
two hair-cutters, who wielded their heavy clippers with clumsy haste. Then we were told to strip, remove
everything, and we lined up, naked, before being inspected by an MO (Medical
Officer), who examined our chests, our eyes, our teeth, before telling us to
adopt that most submissive and humiliating posture, to bend over and
cough.
Our first session of drill on the
parade-ground followed.
It was a shambles, as most conscripts
seemed not to know their left from their right nor to understand or even hear
the shouted orders. Any rebellious
attitude or remark resulted in the miscreant being ordered to double around the
parade-ground. We were supposed to have
already learned our full Army numbers, the last three digits in
particular. A surly Scot or Northerner,
when asked what his was, replied, ‘Fuck knows.’
‘Don’t you fucking swear at me!’ yelled the NCO and made the offender
double around the parade-ground twice.
A great deal that was new was happening
then and I may well have misremembered the sequence of events, then and later
on. But our first full day, Thursday,
was pay-day, and we would have received our weekly wage of £1-8-0 (one pound,
eight shillings). Not a lot. The average working wage at that time was £8
a week.
For the next two weeks of basic training
we would be on the move and fully occupied for twelve hours every day. In the evenings we spent most of the time
cleaning our kit, brushing wetted blanco onto our gaiters and belt and
polishing its brass attachments. An
implement called a button-stick, slid under the individual buttons of our
greatcoats, prevented the coarse material being besmirched with Brasso, which
was also applied to the Royal Artillery badges on our berets.
Polishing the toecaps of our best boots
until they gleamed like the black glass of our L/Bdr’s toecaps was the most
tedious labour. There were bumps or bubbles
on the leather of our new boots and those on the toecaps had to be pressed flat
with a heated spoon, then dowsed in cold water and religiously rubbed in a
circular motion with a mix of spit and polish.
Some bold squaddies used a hot iron.
We also had to learn how to iron our trousers, and sometimes our shirts
– something only mothers had done for us till then. Damp brown paper, as we learned from
squaddies whose ex-Army older brothers had passed on useful tips, could produce
the perfect knife-edge creases like those on our Sergeant’s trousers. Few of us, however, succeeded in getting our
trousers to fold so neatly and uniformly over our gaiters as he did. Ours rode up. His secret, it was rumoured, was that he
used weights, or even stitches, or both.
‘Bull’ was the word describing what we did
to the toecaps of our boots -- as well as to all the other tasks involving
polishing, cleaning, shovelling, painting, sweeping and getting down and dirty. And a ‘bollocking’ was what we received
when we got anything wrong. The worst
bollocking I got, and to begin with they happened daily, was when I saluted an
RSM by mistake. ‘Bollocks!’ was also a
way of contemptuously saying ‘Rubbish!’ -- as well as a word for one’s
testicles.
Even at weekends we might be ordered to
perform various menial tasks in our overalls or fatigues, like cleaning floors,
or shovelling lumps of coke into and out of a truck, or sweeping up fallen
autumn leaves, or whitewashing large stones along some of the roads. I did all of that. We
were told, ‘If it moves, salute it! If
it doesn’t, whitewash it!’ Once I was
ordered to clip the ragged grassy edges along a road, crawling along on my
hands and knees and using a pair of scissors.
Our Sergeant probably entered our lives
that first Thursday morning. He it was
who would order us about for the next two weeks, shouting at us more than most,
though not that savagely, especially when drilling us on the bleak expanse of
the parade ground.
I presume we were allocated our .303 Enfield rifles that
morning and given instructions in their care, cleaning and safety. This mainly required us to remove the bolt,
wipe it with an oily rag and then pull it through the barrel using (what else?)
a pull-through, a slim metal weight at the end of a piece of string. We were encouraged to love and cherish our
rifles, the loss and damage of which would result in the most severe and awful
punishments. The rifles were kept in a
rack in the barrack room, chained and padlocked. The loss of any Army item was also deplored,
resulting, we were told, in disciplinary charges being laid and the offender
being charged with the cost of replacing the missing item. Later on we were taught about the
dismantling, loading and firing of a Bren gun, a lightweight quick-firing
machine-gun, whose name derived from the Czech town where it was originally
made, Brno.
Rifles would not have been borne on parade
that day as we first had to get used to marching – to falling in, falling out,
stepping off with the left foot, snappily halting, and changing direction while
on the move. Because I had been in the
CCF at school, I knew what to do. Not
so most of the others in the squad.
‘About turn!’ seemed to cause the most confusion.
Being the tallest in the squad, I was
again the right marker, as I had been at school. Wearing boots I was 6 feet 5. The Army liked grading and graduating its
platoons or squads, and one of the first things our Sergeant did was to get us
to stand in a long line with the tallest, me, on the right. We then had to shout out our positional
numbers – ‘One! Two! Three!’ etc, up to 36.
Since we marched in rows three abreast, Two and Three were told to fall
in behind me. That left Four beside me
and Five and Six behind Four, and so on.
This meant that the squad sloped slightly, with the tallest at the front
when marching and the shortest at the rear.
In some cases the tallest were positioned
at the front and rear, with the smallest in the middle. Inept and scruffy soldiers might be placed
in the middle row, so that they would be partly masked by the first and third
rows on either side of them. Within two
weeks we marched and drilled almost like automata and at the passing-out parade
were judged to be the top squad in the Battery.
That day was a long way off, however, and
that weekend a long one. Confined to
barracks for two weeks, we were kept busy with all manner of servile jobs
called General Duties -- apart from applying Blanco, Brasso and Kiwi polish to
our kits. Like virtually everyone else I was not
acquainted with the list of things every squaddie must know, one of which was
‘Never volunteer for anything.’ For
instance anyone who said he could play the piano would be detailed to shift it
from one place to another in the NAAFI or to some other site. So when some genial sergeant inquired
whether any of us had done any drawing or painting and I indicated that I had,
I was given the task of numbering all the metal items that each squaddie
possessed with his full Army number.
As every soldier’s Army number contained
eight digits, the eight had to be individually indented in a tidy row on each
item, which included every squaddie’s knife, fork and spoon and his mess-tin. I was provided with a box of small spikes
with numbers from 1 to 9 plus 0 at one end of each spike, and with a small
hammer had to bash each number into every metal item. As there were 36 of us in the squad, eight
digits had to be carefully hammered, 36 times and without any errors, into the
reverse or bottom of every item – a total of some 1,440 times.
As I remember, this took me the whole
weekend, isolating me at a table, with mounds of kit, small numbered spikes and
a hammer. The only consolation was that
I was excused General Duties. At the
same time each of us had to put our Army numbers on other items, like our
webbing. This was done by painting on
the numbers using a stencil. Some
kindly squaddie helped me out by stencilling some of my gear.
Before I came to Oswestry I had been
apprehensive about the thuggish working-class boys I imagined I was going to
have to live with and share a barrack room with. Coming from a middle-class family and having
been educated at a public school I had never met any working-class boys, who
were supposedly foul-mouthed, coarse and crude, with violent dispositions and a
liking for fights and drink. I was accordingly
wary of lads with regional and uncouth accents and naturally gravitated towards
the few well-spoken boys among us. But
once I had become accustomed to the assorted accents of the others, the most
impenetrable accents belonging to squaddies from Glasgow,
Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle, I began to feel more at ease with
them. We were, after all, far from home
and were all beset with similar anxieties and uncertainties, by harsh regimes
and ferocious voices. We were also the
same age, 18 or 19, and were united by our sufferings, and being in a squad and
living together promoted a supportive family feeling. It was Us against Them.
I also discovered that the supposedly
thuggish working-class boys were actually brighter, more humourous and
quick-witted, than some of the boys at my school. Nor did they swear that much. And
although they might not know any Latin or Greek, they knew about Life. They knew about work and money and people
and social conditions and politics, all of which were obscure matters to
me. Some knew about girls, and
sex. But most of us were virgin soldiers,
and most, I believe, remained so for the next two years.
Apart from mainly and inevitably
associating with any grammar school or public school types in the squad, I
associated with other Scots and anyone approaching my height. No one made any lasting friendships. We were aware that although our present
situation seemed interminable and occasionally intolerable, it was
temporary. In two weeks we would be
somewhere else, with other people and otherwise employed. Nonetheless we shared hardships and our
meals together and in the NAAFI we relaxed enjoyably enough over beans on toast
(3d) and an orange squash (3d) or a plate of chips (2d). There was a piano in the NAAFI and once or
twice I was persuaded to play, but as I knew little by heart apart from the
theme from The Third Man and some songs from South Pacific, I soon retreated,
yielding the chair to a squaddie who, like my father, could played by ear,
without music, and rattled out some wartime songs and popular songs of the day.
A
jukebox in the NAAFI churned out songs from the hit parade. In 1955 these song-hits included Mambo
Italiano (Rosemary Clooney), Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (Herb Alpert),
Stranger in Paradise (Tony Bennett), Unchained Melody (Jimmy Young), and Rose
Marie (Slim Whitman). In November that
year a new sound could be heard – Bill Haley’s Rock around the Clock reached No
1 in the UK
charts – and a new singer, Elvis Presley, aged 20, was signed up by RCA. For some reason, maybe it was a bit of wan
and wishful thinking, the song I used to hum the most at Oswestry was Peggy
Lee’s It’s a Good Day (from morning to night).
That first weekend something happened that
may, obscurely, have changed the pattern of my life. For I changed my first name.
I had never been fond of my first name,
Ronald, nor of being called Ron, and I hated Ronnie. At school I was Ron or Honey. In the 1960s I would sometimes devise other
stage or authorship names for myself, like Jordan or Jon Honicombe, names that
didn’t belong to someone or something else.
To this end I studied numerology -- numbers that were attached to each
letter of the alphabet and to the cumulative totals of names. Some were lucky numbers and promised great
things. But it was a radio programme
that prompted my name-change at Oswestry.
A comedy half-hour on BBC Radio’s Light
Programme, Take It From Here, first aired in 1948, had in the 1950s acquired a
family called the Glums. Ron was a
soppy young man (Dick Bentley), a weak and idle loser, whose girl-friend was
Eth (June Whitfield), and whose boisterous and prospective father-in-law was
Jimmy Edwards. ‘Oh, Ron!’ she used to
cry pathetically when Ron was being pathetic.
At Oswestry I didn’t want the soldiery to imitate Eth’s wailing cry and
connect me with a pathetic loser. So I
boldly replied, when asked what my name was – ‘Gordon’ – my father’s name. And Gordon Honeycombe I became from then on,
as an author, actor and TV newsreader, although my mother and sister continued
to call me Ronald all their lives.
Coincidentally, at the end of the radio series,
in 1960, the Glums emigrated to Australia
-- as I intended to do in 1965 and did almost 30 years after that.
Why did I take my father’s name? He had sired me but had hardly impinged on
my existence. No one unconnected with
my National Service life knew I was really Ronald and none of my family knew I
was Gordon now. For a time there were
two Gordons, separated by thousands of miles.
But by the end of my National Service there was only one.
In Oswestry that October, time passed in a
blur of drills, weapons training, PT (in navy blue shorts and white vests), kit
inspections, room inspections and shouted orders. Evening fatigues involved sweeping and ‘bumping’
floors, and cleaning and polishing our kit.
Meanwhile, the days were getting colder, shorter, and the nights longer,
and when they got so cold there was frost on the windows, we spread our
greatcoats on top of our blankets to keep us warm. At night, before I slept, I could hear the
distant clanking of goods-trains shunting wagons in the sidings at Gobowen,
sounds that filled me, and most of us I imagine, with surfacing yearning. For trains would take us home, and home we
longed to go.
After
the two weeks of basic training were over, I and some of the others became a
TARA (Technical Assistant Royal Artillery) in 24 (The Irish) Battery,
which necessitated a move into another spider, with different NCOs in charge,
L/Bdr Maltby and Sgt Culverhouse.
L/Bdr Maltby was tall, fresh-faced
and fit -- he played rugby. His uniform
was immaculate, the seams of his BD trousers were knife-edged and the legs of
his trousers finely balanced above his gaiters. We addressed him, when not on parade, as
‘Bomb’. He had a sharp, nasal voice and
wielded the short cane that all NCOs in the RA carried, usually tucked under an
arm, with an expert flourish, twirling it, pointing, poking and thwacking
items, though never us. He was also a
National Serviceman, who had signed on for three years.
Sgt Culverhouse could be a bit of a
sod. A smaller man than Maltby, he must
have been about 34 and was a regular soldier.
He moved jerkily, with swift and sudden movements, and most of us were
scared of him. There was an officer in
overall charge of our Battery, a tall,
well-spoken National Service 2/Lt (Second Lieutenant). Such officers were known by us as
‘twits’. We saw very little of our
officer, except when he carried out kit and room inspections attended by
Culverhouse and Maltby.
My new spider had curtains which could be
drawn at night, and there was a wooden wall locker above each bed. Each of us was also provided with a
collapsible wooden chair, and in a rare photo of that time what looks like a
radiator can be seen. The photo shows
three of us, seated, cleaning our kit unsmilingly and looking scruffy and
worn. My two companions were John
Hopkins and John Tabberer. Both were
also public-school boys, and though we said we’d keep in touch after leaving
Oswestry, we never did.
By now we had become accustomed to being
ordered about and being shouted at. Sgt
Culverhouse was an expert in yelling abuse.
His language was colourful and inventive, though I can’t remember any of
the explosive phrases that blasted the cold air of the parade ground. Drills and inspections now became even more
arduous and exacting. In compensation
we were, by now, allowed some free time at weekends.
A few squaddies, if they lived in England or Wales and not too far away, went
home. To console and entertain
those who remained behind there was the occasional sporting event. One Saturday afternoon we loyally went to
watch Maltby play Inter-services rugby on a frozen pitch. There would also have been the occasional
concert or cinema show in one of the bigger Park Hall huts, although I have no
memories of this. But I remember the
short educational films we were shown about the horrors of contracting VD, ie,
syphilis and gonorrhea. Chlamydia and
other STDs (or STIs as they are called now) were not named. These films were in colour and included, as
well as diagrams, lurid close-ups of diseased dicks, rotting, red and purple --
enough to put you off sex for life, or at least a week.
Ever
solicitous about our hygiene and health, the Army also insisted on injecting
us, not once but twice (the second injection being a booster) with non-lethal
amounts of typhus, tetanus and diphtheria.
Polio had been warded off while we were at school by a drop of some
yellow liquid on a sugar cube.
Some of
us reacted badly to these injections; some collapsed; one or two ended up in
hospital. After a booster injection I
was ordered to return to my squad, who were drilling on the parade ground. I must have been feeling giddy and feeble,
for I did something wrong or wobbled when I should have been ramrod erect. Sgt Culverhouse yelled at me for what seemed
like a minute, shouting up at me from within a foot of my face. I gazed fixedly ahead, as one was supposed
to do, straight over his beret. Knowing
that I had just visited the MO, he then told me to fall out. I staggered off to lie down for a while on
my barrack room bed.
Most of
our free time was spent in the NAAFI or lying on our beds, or ‘wanking pits’ as they were
called in the Army. I recall only one
trip I made into Oswestry, walking in uniform down long, straight Whittington Road to
the nearest pub, where we made the most of the half of bitter we could afford. We were always short of money. Some thoughtful parents enclosed pound notes
in their letters. Some sent food parcels, the contents of which
were always shared with other squaddies.
On Thursdays we queued up to be paid our
meagre weekly wage, most of which was spent in the NAAFI or on the
long and usually complicated rail journeys home. A weekend pass theoretically began on
Friday, at the end of the working day. But
as Friday evenings were usually occupied by fatigues and other duties, we were
seldom able to head for home until Saturday morning. This afforded us just one night at home, for
we had to be back in barracks by one minute to midnight on the Sunday. In my case, as it could take as much as
eight hours to get to Edinburgh, and another eight to get back, I was able to
divest myself of my battle-dress uniform, boots, belt and beret and don civvy
clothes only on Saturday night and Sunday morning. The Sunday night curfew was, however, relaxed
later on. One night, in the dark bitter
chill of deepest winter I once hitched lifts in lorries from Crewe to Oswestry,
in order to return before roll-call on the Monday morning.
It was
as TARAs that we were confronted for the first
time with the 25-pounder gun. Introduced just before WW2, it was the Army’s
main artillery field-piece until well into the 1960s. Its shells weighed 25 pounds. When in action it and an ammunition limber
were towed by a quad, a Morris C8 Field Artillery Tractor. TARAs, and
there were six to each gun, were responsible for the loading, firing and
maintenance of the gun, and we accordingly learned to do mathematical
calculations concerning elevation and range.
Some basic map-reading was also done, mainly concerning contours,
valleys and hills and the interpretations of symbols of maps denoting
windmills, churches, power lines, railways and other items and aspects of a
landscape.
About the
middle of November, 48 of us (there were six in each gun-crew) were taken to a
gunnery range in Wales,
where every gun-crew actually fired a gun.
It was the first and last time I did so in all my two years of National
Service. And something went wrong.
I was
told before we left Park Hall Camp that I was to be the No 1 on the gun, a
position usually filled by a Sergeant.
It was my job to issue orders to the five others in the gun-crew. No 2 operated the breech; No 3 was the
layer, who set the gun’s elevation depending on the range; No 4 was the loader,
and 5 and 6 were in charge of the ammunition.
No 6 was usually a Bombardier and second-in-command.
On a fine
sunny morning, cold, crisp and clear, we set off in a convoy, riding in quads,
which were unencumbered by gun or limber as our eight guns were already lined
up on the gunnery range at Trawsfynydd.
The quad was enclosed, but there was a hatch in its roof, and I was
able, because I was the No 1, to stand and poke my head and shoulders out of
the hatch and view the sunny, wintry countryside, occasionally waving a lordly
hand at the startled inhabitants of towns and villages through which we
passed. The changing scenery, the
fresh, cold air, the speeding quad and the sensations of riding into battle and
also of freedom, were exhilarating. We
soon left Shropshire and were in Wales, where I had never been. We passed through Llangollen and Corwen,
driving westwards into the foothills and increasingly mountainous country, past
a spooky lake called Bala and on to Trawsfynydd, which was about 10 miles east
of Harlech.
Trawsfynydd was a small Welsh village, which also gave its name to a
large lake, a man-made reservoir. Eight
25-pounder guns were lined up on a low grassy ridge, pointing at far-away
targets on a hillside beyond the dead ground of a shallow valley. After a break for sandwiches and cups of
tea, we were directed towards the guns, each gun-crew being ordered to take up
positions by a supervising Sergeant. We
knelt on our right knees, at stiff attention, beside the gun. No 3, the layer, had a seat to the left of
the breech and behind the gun’s shield.
I knelt to the rear and on the right-hand side of the breech. I began to feel nervous – we were really
going to fire the gun. Everything began
to seem unreal.
I gave
No 3 the necessary co-ordinates for the target.
A shell was fetched by No 5 and shoved into the open gun-breech by No 4
with a short rod known as a rammer. A
cartridge shell of about the same size was pushed in after it and the breech,
which had a handle, was closed.
And then, unexpectedly, the breech silently
opened itself of its own accord. And the
cartridge slid slowly out and fell on the grass.
None of us
moved. I stared at the cartridge in
disbelief, fully expecting the shell to follow the cartridge, to strike it, and
blow us all to bits. Then a voice behind
me, that of our Sergeant, calmly instructed No 5 to pick up the cartridge and
retire to the rear. He did so and soon
returned with another cartridge, which was shoved into the gun. Once again No 2 closed the breech, very forcefully
this time, and when the other five had called out ‘Ready!’ I shouted, somewhat
hoarsely, ‘Fire!’
A
colossal bang -- some smoke drifted past us -- and then there was silence, for
what seemed like for ever. Far away
across the valley there appeared a soundless tiny puff of grey smoke. Whether we hit the target or not I don’t
remember, and whether we were ever in real danger I do not know. But the Sergeant commended us – for what? –
and that was that.
Eight
weeks with 24 (The Irish) Battery at Oswestry
came to an end with a passing-out parade on 25 November, a Thursday. We were adjudged to be the top squad. Sgt Culverhouse and Maltby must have been well
pleased – ‘chuffed’ as we said then – and we felt rather proud, or ‘chuffed to
little NAAFI breaks’ as the saying was.
We were
now split up, all of us being sent to other RA establishments, to other
regiments or to learn a trade, like that of driver or mechanic. One or two who were illiterate were taken on
by an Education Officer and taught how to read and write.
I had
already decided to be a clerk. I didn’t
want to be an officer, a decision enforced by what I’d seen of some of the National
Service twits. Besides, before becoming
an officer, I would have had to endure six months of officer training at the
Officer Cadet Training Unit at Mons Barracks in Aldershot
– no thanks – and I didn’t wish to be burdened with the responsibilities or the
costs and the company of an officers’ mess.
I wanted to pass my two years of National Service as anonymously, as
quietly and as comfortably as was possible, an aim that might be accomplished
by working in an office, largely avoiding drills and general duties, not to
mention manoeuvres and marches. All I
wanted to achieve in my absence from civilisation was to learn how to type
(useful for a budding author) and how to drive, and to see some foreign
lands. All of this happened -- as well
as one or two other things that would have an unimaginable influence on my
future career.
But
because I had been to a public school and was going to Oxford University in
October 1957, I was deemed by the class-conscious authorities to be promising
officer material and sent, despite a feeble protest – how could I not want to
be an officer? -- to a War Office Selection Board (WOSB), where my potential
officer qualities would be assessed.
The
three and a half day assessment was held at an Army base at Barton Stacey near Andover. Eight of us youthful potential officers were
put through various mental and physical aptitude tests, all the time being
supervised and appraised by a captain and a colonel. We
were interviewed and there were written intelligence tests, and on the second
day each of us had to puzzle out how to transport our group of eight, within a
given time and without touching the ground, between two platforms or across an
imagined river, using such items as a long length of rope, some planks and a
barrel. Individually we were supposed
to weigh in with intelligent suggestions and energetic actions. Some of the chaps, showing much zeal and bags
of initiative, worked out the problems without any mishaps. Some were not as successful. I generally hadn’t a clue what to do and
hardly spoke. I just did what I was
told.
When it
was my turn to lead the group, I asked the others in the group how they would
tackle the problem. One or two who were
keen to impress the captain were glad to assist me with ideas and, encouraged
by me, took charge, solving the problem on my behalf. I was worried lest this delegation of my
leadership to others might seem a rather subtle way of inspiring teamwork. But the captain took me aside and inquired,
‘Why aren’t you trying, Honeycombe? Is
anything the matter?’ I looked grave and
said, inventively, and truthfully as it turned out, ‘My father isn’t very
well.’ ‘Ah,’ he said.
At the
end of the day each of us had to stand at a lectern in a small classroom,
facing the others, who were seated – they included the captain and colonel --
and give a five-minute talk or lecture on a subject of our choice. I had never been any good at public speaking
or speaking off the cuff, being stupidly self-conscious and shy. I was marginally more relaxed when talking
about something I knew. While the other
seven spoke animatedly about worthy subjects of a political, historical or
sporting sort, I spoke – and I can hardly believe that the memory is a true one
– about the Care and Cleaning of Hamsters.
How
this was received I don’t remember. But
the following morning, when we were seen one after the other by the Colonel and
our officer potential assessed, I was told I hadn’t passed. In fact only two of our group were chosen to
be officers and go on to Mons.
So it
was as an obscure but gratified gunner that I returned to Oswestry and applied
to be trained as a clerk. After a week
or so of festering in a Battery office, making myself useful by taking messages
for an oddly motherly, red-faced BSM (Battery Sergeant-Major), by sorting this
and that and by making cups of tea, I was posted to Woolwich Arsenal,
headquarters of the Royal Artillery in London.
But
first, I was allowed to go home for Christmas, for a long weekend, as Christmas
Day was on a Saturday that year.
I
lodged with my mother, but where she was living after leaving 16 Great King
Street I don’t recall, although I know that she was in rooms at 4 Inverleith
Terrace in April 1957. Perhaps my
father lived with her there during the summer.
But he spent the winter months in the Royal Circus Hotel, a small
residential hotel in Royal Circus, not far from Great King Street. He had been there since October 1955. He had a room on the ground floor, for he
had difficulty breathing and in climbing stairs, having to pause frequently
when he did so, and he became easily tired.
His emphysema had worsened, but I was told little except that he tired
easily and wasn’t too well. I don’t
think my parents could both afford to live in the hotel, so my mother must have
been living in rented accommodation not too far away.
I
remember sitting with him in the gloomy lounge of the Royal Circus Hotel. He had some kind of aspirator to help him
breathe. He didn’t complain and
endeavoured to be cheerful. I felt
uncomfortable with the fact that he and my mother were apparently living apart,
and because of my experiences with doctors and hospitals in India I viewed
any ill-health askance, and that, combined with the callous indifference of
youth and my consuming egoism and self-interest, made me unsympathetic. My father used to embarrass me because he
drank too much and now he embarrassed me because he was ill.
Where
Christmas Day was spent I do not know, presumably at my sister’s and Jim’s new
semi-detached house at 117
Broomhall Crescent on a newly built and treeless
estate to the west of Edinburgh.
Before
long I was heading south once again, in uniform, but this time taking a case
containing some civilian clothes, as we were now permitted to change into
civvies every evening and at weekends.
At some point in the New Year I travelled to London and then entrained from Waterloo
Station to Woolwich to be trained as a clerk.
The
barracks at Woolwich had been built between 1776 and 1802 and the tall, stark
buildings, most of three floors, were much used during the Napoleonic wars and
hadn’t changed much since then. The
front of the barracks, which contained the administration buildings, the
officers’ mess and accommodation, faced the largest parade ground of any
barracks in Britain
and had the longest continuous façade of any building. The clerks’ school was elsewhere, in an
obscure corner of the Woolwich complex.
Its classroom, set with rows of Remington typewriters on tables, was run
by a sergeant. There were about 21 of
us on the course and we had to march as a squad to and from the school and
about the barracks. As the sergeant had
no back-up, I was appointed to be in charge of the squad, to take them to and
from the school, to shout, ‘Quick march!’ and ‘Halt!’ and ‘Eyyyyyyyes right!’
if we passed an officer. As a result I
was made a temporary L/Bdr, officially known as a local-lance-bombardier
because I received no extra pay. Still,
this allowed me to get a chevron sewn onto my battle-dress sleeves, to feel
temporarily important and for the squad to call me ‘Bomb’.
My squad
of clerks was housed in a high-ceilinged first-floor barrack room with about
eight wash-basins at one end. Toilets
and showers were in a badly lit wash-house somewhere outside. Being a L/L/Bdr I was provided with a bed
in a little room at the other end from the wash-room and this I shared with
another lance-bombardier. We slept in a
two-tier bunk, I on the lower level.
This time there were no kit inspections, as I remember, and while we
were on the clerks’ course no guard or general duties. Discipline was slack. My squad had only me and the sergeant to
contend with. And as the food in the
ORs (Other Ranks) Mess was plentiful and excellent, and the NAAFI warm and a
basic but pleasant enough place to sit and chat, we were generally happier and
more relaxed than we had been at Oswestry.
However, that January the weather was extremely cold.
In the
NAAFI the records played on the jukebox churned out tunes for most of the
day. We never listened to a radio and
the only papers glanced at were the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express. An upbeat melody called Zambezi
was played every day on the jukebox, as was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen
Tons. Also popular were Memories are
Made of This (Dean Martin) and The Yellow Rose of Texas (Mitch Miller). A mournful new song, It’s Almost Tomorrow,
was catching on and Bill Haley was still rocking around the clock. Last year’s sentimental hits, Secret Love
and Three Coins in the Fountain had been surpassed by an even more glossily
romantic hit, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, sung by the Four Aces.
I had
seen the film in Edinburgh in 1955, little thinking it would partly determine
what would happen in 1956 and much that happened thereafter.
Again, I
made no particular friends and I can’t recall anyone’s name, although in the
evening, at the suggestion or persuasion of others, I would venture out of the
Main Gate and proceed down Artillery
Place into Woolwich for a beer or perhaps to see a
movie. One of our group was a Jehovah’s
Witness and he took me to a meeting somewhere in a small room. It all seemed rather bizarre and I failed to
be converted. Another squaddie tried to
persuade me to meet two new male civilian friends of his in London who would give us ‘a good time’. Not being good with strangers I wasn’t keen,
and the squaddie, a large, fairish and pasty young man, was not much to my
liking. So I declined and failed to
enjoy that particular good and gay time.
I was very naïve and innocent in those days.
Yet I
was eventually able to work out what was going on one night in the bunk above
me. A stealthy and persistent creaking
of springs, with long pauses, woke me up, and I wondered why the upper occupant
was so restless and seemingly obsessed with not making any noise. As the surreptitious creaks and pauses continued,
I realised what he was probably up to in the upper bunk and wondered whether I
should tell him to get on with it, or offer to lend him a hand. I did neither. At last the creaking ceased and both of us
fell thankfully asleep.
Such
activities were usually confined to toilets and showers in the Army. As every young squaddie was well aware, Wanking
was not a town in China.
I was
still writing sonnets in my little black book.
One is dated January 56 and the other March 56. I recall that the latter was finished as I
sat in one of the outside toilet blocks in Woolwich. Not a very poetical place, but private, and
the mind and imagination in such a place were free to roam.
The
clerks’ course, in which we were taught how to type speedily with two fingers,
concluded at the end of January. I
still use two fingers to type. We also
learned about the spacing and margins of letters and orders and how to use the
Roneo machine and file things away.
Eventually I achieved the top two-finger speed of typing 30 words a
minute, and in a series of final tests did so with little or no errors and so
became a Clerk BIII. By the conclusion
of my National Service stint my clerical skills were such that I had achieved
the top two-finger distinction of being a BII.
Unfortunately, at the end of the course I was deprived of my rank of
L/L/Bdr and removed from the doubtful privilege of sharing a double bunk. From now on I slept among the other gunners
in the barrack room and was liable to be put on guard and given fatigue duties,
while awaiting a posting to some RA regiment.
As it
happened I was given a fateful choice as to where I would like to spend the
rest of my two years of National Service.
What
happened was that because I had come out top of the class and had briefly been
a L/L/Bdr, the sergeant who’d been instructing us invited me to come to his
office and told me I had the first choice of all the postings that were on his
list. He showed me the list, which
included postings with regiments and batteries around the world. There were several in Britain, several in Germany,
others in Gibraltar, Cyprus,
Aden, Singapore
and Hong Kong. I stared at the list for some moments, and
then asked him if I could tell him tomorrow where I would like to go. Dazed by all the options open to me I left
the room.
I had
absolutely no idea, and could have none, as to how much of my future would be
determined by my choice. Little do we
know how some decisions we make, just one decision, will change the course and
pattern of our lives.
I must
have tried to recall what I’d read or knew about the places on the list and
discussed the matter with other squaddies in the NAAFI. I sought advice, as I usually do. But it was clear to me that Britain and Germany wouldn’t feature in my
final choice. The weather in both
countries was indifferent, and the postings weren’t far enough away from
home. I’d wanted to travel, to see
something of faraway places. My Aunt
Dorothy used to sing a song called Far Away Places – ‘Far away places with
strange soundin’ names, far away over the sea … are callin’, callin’ me’, and
although Cyprus, a sunny Mediterranean island, was an attractive proposition –
and one day I would write a novel set there – it was the two furthest postings,
Singapore and Hong Kong that promised most.
Aden
was a possibility, but I thought it would be a small place, and too hot and too
like India. Singapore
and Hong Kong were oriental cities, and a
troopship would take three weeks to reach them. The time spent going there and coming back
would mean six not unpleasant weeks at sea, which would include ports of call
and no guard duties, kit inspections or ‘bull’.
In the
end I chose Hong Kong, the furthest of all the
far away places, which I was unlikely to visit in the foreseeable future. Besides, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,
the song and the film, made Hong Kong seem
like one of the most romantic, exotic places on Earth.
And so,
the following morning I told the sergeant which posting I had chosen, and the
others on the clerks’ course duly ended up in Britain,
Germany, Cyprus, Aden and Singapore.
There
was now a hiatus, as the troopship that would take me and over 1,000 officers,
NCOs and servicemen around the world didn’t depart until 23 March. For some weeks I was fodder for fatigues and
guard duties, the latter being among the worst things I had to do on my
National Service, partly because it was bitterly cold. On 1 February 1956 Britain froze
through the coldest day since 1895.
The
guard-room at the Main Gate on Artillery
Place was the focus of our duties from 6.0 pm to
6.0 am, during which we stood guard at some designated place for two hours. We were
then permitted to lie down for four hours on cots in the rear of the guard-room,
fully garbed in battle-dress, boots and gaiters – we were allowed to remove our
greatcoats and our berets -- with the naked bulb of a ceiling light glaring
down on our sleepless forms. Such was
the discomfort it was almost impossible to get any sleep. I felt dopey and ill on being roughly
aroused to go on guard when it was my turn.
Periodically we were revived with cups of strong sweet tea.
One of
the guard duties entailed guarding a hut with a high metal fence around it, the
hut being said to contain weapons or ammunition useful to the IRA. Two of us carried out this guard, with
loaded rifles – one inside the fence, locked in, and the other outside. We had to be alert for any eventuality and
no conversation was allowed. The Sergeant
of the Guard marched us there and marched us back when our two hours was
up. He must have had to stay awake all
night. The only consolatory reward was
that we were excused duties the following day.
I have never known nights of such dreamlike darkness, silence and
chilling cold.
But the
worst night was when the six-man guard, at the start of our duty, lined up on
the vast parade ground facing the lit façade of the longest building in the UK. The officer who was to inspect us seemed to
be slow in arriving, and in the icy waste of the parade ground our bodies slowly
froze. We became like blocks of ice,
and yet our ears and faces felt as if they were on fire. We could hardly move when we were ordered
from ‘At Ease!’ to ‘Attention!’ and then marched stiffly away.
I had
two weeks’ embarkation leave in March. But before that I used a weekend pass to go
down to Bournemouth to see Aunt Donny. She had recently moved into a flat in a
large Victorian house called Hurlingham in Manor Road.
In Edinburgh my father was
still in the Royal Circus Hotel and my mother was in a rented flat in one of
those grey four-storey granite buildings that are a feature of the city. This one was between Bruntsfield and
Marchmont, possibly in Thirlestane
Road. My
sister and Jim were out at Broomhall. I
visited them there, travelling across the city by bus, as by now nearly all of Edinburgh’s trams had
been replaced by buses, the last tram entering the Shrubhill depot in November
1956.
Now that
the family had broken up and that no place was home any more, I felt less connected
to all of them and gloomily looked forward to whatever might befall on the
other side of the world. Goodbyes
seemed final, and in my ailing father’s case it was.
On 22
March hundreds of National Service and regular servicemen, including me, laden
with kitbags, backpacks and cases, entrained at London Waterloo for Southampton
and HMT (Her Majesty’s Troopship) Asturias.
My Aunt
drove over from Bournemouth with her friend,
Doris Schwyn, to see me off. In the
third volume of her Memories she wrote: ‘A very long train filled with
khaki-clad soldiers steamed into the station, and within seconds the platform
was alive with uniformed young men, hundreds of them, lining up in rows, with
enormous packs strapped onto their backs.
We had no difficulty in spotting Ronald – he stood head and shoulders
above most of them. Standing alongside
Ronald was a diminutive figure – he could not have been more than 5’2”
tall. He was dark-skinned and appeared
to be almost weighed down with the weight of the huge pack he was
shouldering. Doris and I had to smile
at the picture they presented as they marched off side by side.’
My short
companion was Gunner Ron Ayee, another clerk, who had attached himself to me in
Woolwich. He had glossy black hair and
his eyes slanted; his family must have originated in the East.
My Aunt
continued: ‘We were allowed onto the quayside, where the Asturias was
berthed and watched the embarkation. We
couldn’t have any conversation with Ronald, but were able to wave and shout
words of encouragement. Some time later
his head appeared looking out of a port-hole.
He was waving and seemed in good spirits. After a few more shouted messages of “Bon
voyage” and “Good luck” we finally waved him farewell, as we knew the ship
would not be sailing for some considerable time.’
She was
right. The Asturias didn’t sail until the
following day. There were still more
troops to be taken on board. But when
all the soldiery and their equipment were accounted for and stowed away,
without ceremony, with no bands playing or coloured streamers linking us to the
quay, the ship slid imperceptibly away from the shore and swung slowly out into
the Solent.
For a
while I watched, with an ache in my heart, while the low shoreline got lower
and lower and faded away as we moved out to sea. Everything I knew and everyone I had known
was disappearing from my view.
8.
HONG KONG, 1956-57
There were five decks with accommodation
on the Asturias, graded downwards from
A to E, with senior and junior officers occupying the top-deck cabins, senior
and junior NCOs below and 900 or so of us gunners and others on E Deck, some
six feet or so above the water-line.
On going on board we were allocated a deck
and a berth number in cramped and narrow cabins which had six bunks in tiers,
three on each side, with room for only two persons to stand up between the
bunks. There was a port-hole opposite
the cabin door. Presumably there were
lockers where we heaped our kitbags, packs and surplus kit. Presumably there was also some form of basic
air-conditioning – blowers. Toilets and
washing, shaving and showering facilities were elsewhere, sometimes at a distance
and even on another level. Special
gritty soap, suitable for use in sea-water, was provided. Feeding
times in the various messes were fixed, and in ours there was more than one
sitting. Life-boat drills were carried
out more than once during the voyage and such a drill was the first activity we
reported for, at a designated life-boat station on an upper deck, instructed
over the tannoy or loudspeaker system, which also broadcast Reveille, BBC radio
news and items of shipboard information.
The
voyage took 26 days and there were brief stops along the way. I had travelled on this route before, as a
baby, and in the reverse direction in 1946, when I was nine. Ten years after that the slow progress of
the Asturias through the Suez Canal was still a major scenic event, as were the
foreign ports where we anchored offshore or edged alongside a quay. At some point, when the weather warmed up,
before the ship reached the Suez Canal and the Red Sea,
we stopped wearing battle-dress and switched to looser, thinner Khaki Drill
uniforms, or OGs as they were known because of their olive green colour. Even the sleeveless vests and the underpants
were olive green.
I would have been sea-sick soon after we
headed across the Bay of Biscay and into the Atlantic. I was invariably sea-sick on the first or
second day of a voyage. It was the heavy lurching, tilting and
plunging of the ship -- sideways, up and down – that brought my stomach into my
mouth, as well as the stale miasmic atmosphere of fuel oil, cleaning fluids,
food and toilet smells. But I soon
acclimatised and felt better when I could breathe the tangy salt-spray air and
breezes of the open upper decks.
There is something both exhilarating and
restful about being on board a large ship at sea. The misty far horizons, the white waves
pushed aside by the forward motion of the bow, the disappearing creamy wake,
the changing surface of the sea seen from above, were mesmerising when seen
from the breezy upper decks of the ship and made us realise, if dimly, how
alone and small we were in the vastness of the ocean – a feeling magnified at
night when myriad of stars spangled the dark bowl of the sky arching over us
and enclosing us, unimaginably so far away from us yet seeming so near.
HMT Asturias had been a Royal Mail line
ship. Her maiden voyage from Southampton
was in 1926. She was refitted with
turbo engines in 1934, and in 1939, when she was taken over for use as an armed
merchant cruiser, her dummy forward funnel was removed, leaving her with a
single smoke-stack. In 1943 she was
torpedoed by an Italian submarine in the South Atlantic, towed to Freetown in South Africa and abandoned. After WW2 she was towed to Gibraltar and
then to Belfast
for conversion into a troop carrier.
She also carried emigrants to Australia from 1949 to 1952. The following year she brought troops back
from Korea
and was refurbished in 1954. The Asturias was sold for break-up in 1957, a year
or so after she took me to Hong Kong. Before
this happened, she appeared in the Rank film, A Night to Remember, her port
side being used to depict the scenes of lifeboats being lowered.
Of all this I was unaware at the
time. Indeed I existed in a state of non-awareness
for many years, taking everything and everyone at face value and believing what
people said. In short, I was gullible
and unthinking.
I don’t think I was even aware of the fact
that the Asturias was
carrying the complete regiment to which I’d been posted – 15 Medium Regiment RA
– for duties in Hong Kong. This I found out later on. 15 Medium had been based in Germany from
1948 to 1955 and was quite a new regiment, having been created from 3 Medium
Regiment in 1947. It didn’t last long
as a regiment and was placed in ‘suspended animation’ in February 1958. RHQ
Troop, to which I belonged in 56/57 was disbanded and the batteries transferred
to other regiments. Six months after I
left 15 Medium it disappeared, having been in existence for just over 10 years.
Because I had qualified as a BIII clerk, I
was given a daytime job in the ship’s office, which was longer than it was
broad, and with not much room for moving around, being crowded with tables,
chairs, cupboards and shelves.
This narrow office was at the rear of the
ship and was entered from an open upper deck, on which was a large covered
hatch, later used as a boxing ring. My
duties, shared with two or three other clerks, with a sergeant in charge,
consisted of typing daily orders and retyping various standing orders and
taking messages to other offices and departments. Making copies of everything was seldom done
using carbon copies but by a Roneo machine, to which we attached waxed paper
stencils of what had been typed, and fixed them so that they wrapped around a
drum, which had a handle. By turning the handle the stencil revolved,
causing ink on the drum to seep through the cuts made by the keys in the waxed
paper, thus imprinting what had been typed onto the ordinary paper stacked
below. Many copies could thus be
made. Typing errors in the stencil were
lightly brushed with a pinky fluid like nail polish and then over-typed. Everything typed had to be filed away in stiff-backed
ring-files. It wasn’t very arduous,
though tedious, and in delivering orders and messages I was able to move about
and explore the ship, and when out on deck marvel at the unceasing motion of
the miles of sea around us, from horizon to horizon.
After we’d been a day or two at sea,
something happened that would have a significant bearing on what was to
transpire in Hong Kong and on my future and as
yet unimagined career.
2/Lt Mackintosh appeared in the office one
morning and asked me if I would do a job for him. He’d been asked to present record requests
that would be broadcast daily around the ship for half an hour at lunchtime and
he didn’t want to do it. Would I?
Mackintosh, a tall studious-looking
National Service officer with glasses, came from Edinburgh, and I think I must have come to
his notice for some reason at Oswestry.
Perhaps it was because he had been at school in Edinburgh, though not at the Academy, and the
shared public school and Scottish background, and our height, had resulted in
some conversations and forged a temporary interest and bond. Perhaps he also knew I played the piano and
had sung and acted at school.
He showed me the cubicle near the ship’s
office which was used for any announcements being broadcast all over the ship,
and explained the working of the microphone and the turn-table. Records in their jackets were stock-piled
alphabetically on handy shelves. All
were 75s. No 45s or LPs then.
This task, although of a technical nature,
was not difficult to perform. It was
also unsupervised, which would happily get me out of the office and let me hum
along with whatever hits, old and new, were requested. I agreed
to take on this interesting and unusual duty and said, ‘All right.’ And so
it happened, for the duration of the voyage, that I became a primitive DJ on a
troopship and was launched, fortuitously and casually, on a broadcasting
career.
The written requests were put in a box or
delivered to the cubicle where I merely and anonymously read out the requests
and announced the name of the singer or group.
I made no jokes or light-hearted remarks. Any humour was in the requests, which were
mainly played for shipboard wives or faraway girl-friends, for the folks back
home or fellow soldiers. An aggrieved
sergeant once appeared at the door to complain about the amount of requests his
wife was getting from other gunners and asked me not to play them. Some
of the girls named in a request may not have been girls – the names being
squaddies’ jokey nicknames for other gunners.
In Hong Kong a handsome, manly gunner in our troop was known,
incomprehensibly to me, as Georgina.
Sentimental songs featured most, like
Doris Day’s Secret Love, Cara Mia (David Whitfield), and singers like Frankie
Laine, Dean Martin and Jimmy Young. I
may well have played the first single released in America in January 1956 by
21-year-old Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel.
Port Said
and the Suez Canal revived memories of the
voyage in the reverse direction when I was nine, as did the wastes of sand on
either side. And the desert heat was familiar
and welcome. We weren’t allowed ashore
at Port Said, and this may have been the case at
Aden and Colombo,
as I have no recollection of going ashore there on the voyage out. Perhaps shore leave was forbidden or I was
on duty on the ship. Someone had to man
the office.
Once the Asturias
had reached the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean
the troops were entertained by film shows held on an upper deck under the now
brilliantly starry skies, and by the occasional amateur variety show and
various deck sports. A boxing contest
was staged on the hatch outside the ship’s office. One of the gunners in my cabin took part,
Danny Penman. He was Scottish and came from Fife. Ron Ayee was also in my cabin, but I recall
the names of none of the others nor any incidents on the ship. It was the circling, ever-restless blue sea
I mostly remember: sunsets, silent distant storms and lightning, and flying
fish, together with blurred images of the ports of call, the last of which was Singapore,
where I went ashore.
Groups of four were most often formed when
venturing into a foreign country, and as it was hot we wore our trousered and
belted OGs, beret and black shoes. Shoes
were also worn on the ship, as were OG shorts.
I
didn’t much care for Singapore. It was very hot and humid, and in those days
an unattractive, oriental city. After
downing two large bottles of the locally brewed and highly recommended Tiger
Beer I staggered off without the others – one of whom intended to get tattooed
– and ended up in the Botanical Gardens, where the heat and humidity curtailed
any further exploration. I was also
driven away by the screeching racket the cicadas made and by something strangely
menacing about the dark green walls of jungle growth on either side of the
path. I became fearful.
An overpowering atmosphere of fear drove
me to escape from other places in later years, from an empty abandoned house in
Dorset, from a path through Boscombe gardens in Bournemouth (where I would
learn one day that a man had been murdered), from a taxi taking me from the
Domestic Airport in Perth, Western Australia, to my flat in Mount Street. A sense of fear as I sat in the front
passenger seat intensified so much and became so strong that I told the driver
to stop and got out of the taxi before my destination was reached. In this case circumstances led me to
believe that this must have been the taxi in which a serial killer, the Claremont serial killer,
had trapped three girls before murdering them.
The Botanical Gardens in Singapore
had been where some units of British and Australian soldiers were trapped when
the Japanese invaded Singapore.
I knew nothing about this at the time of
course and I knew nothing about the shameful surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, nor
of the atrocities they perpetrated, nor of its return to British rule in
September 1945, nor of the fact that Singapore was in fact an
island. At the Academy modern history
had not been taught beyond the reign of Queen Victoria.
What happened in the first 50 years of the twentieth century I had only gleaned
from newspaper articles, comics and magazines, and the black and white news
items of Pathé Pictorial or Gaumont-British News, which were backed by
nationalistic music and the voices of
gung-ho males.
It was a relief to get back to the ship
and lie down. The following day we voyaged
on northwards to Hong Kong.
HMT Asturias docked at Hong Kong on 17
April 1956, at the troopship and liner terminal on the western edge of the
mainland peninsula of Kowloon, backed by a line of far blue hills, the nine
dragons that gave Kowloon
its name. Opposite Kowloon
was Hong Kong Island,
with the city of Victoria
spread out along the shore and up the slopes of its mountainous interior, the
highest point, 1,100 feet, being known as the Peak.
If the sun didn’t shine that day it nearly always
shines in my memories of Hong Kong. The
glittering waters of its bustling harbour were traversed by Chinese junks,
cargo-boats and sampans, with a few warships at anchor and ocean-going ships
berthed at the Kowloon terminal, and low green
and white Star ferries continually crossing between Kowloon
and Victoria. It was a lively, exotic scene, given extra
colour by the memory of the soaring theme music and filmic images of Love is a
Many-Splendored Thing.
It could rain quite heavily; it could get
hot and humid; and sometimes thunderstorms exploded over the harbour and a
typhoon once threatened to hit the island.
But although the climate was sub-tropical, it seems to me now that the
seasons varied between a perpetual and temperate autumn and spring, sunny and
dry, and the hot, hazy days of summer. And there seemed to be no mosquitos and few
bothersome flies.
There was a brilliant vitality about Hong Kong. It had
the busy bustle of a city, of a Chinese city that never slept, alive with
traffic and noise and the sharp clatter of Mah Jong tiles being slapped down in
brightly lit, open-windowed flats at night, when the main streets were ablaze
with many-coloured neon signs adorned with Chinese characters. It was outlandishly exciting, and only 30
miles away, beyond the New
Territories, was the huge
crouching dragon of Communist China.
Having disembarked en masse from the Asturias, 15 Medium Regiment was transported in
trucks across Kowloon
to Gun Club Hill Barracks, the regiment’s, and my, new home.
Gun Club, as it was known, was situated on
a low hill, the only eminence in the area, and was bounded by Austin Road on its
southern side and by Chatham Road
to the east. Dating from 1904, the
barracks had been occupied mainly by infantry battalions. Beyond the western perimeter were the
grounds of the Kowloon Cricket Club. The
main entrance to Gun Club was at the junction of Austin and Chatham Roads. Inside the gates, which were closed at night,
was the guard-room, up some stone steps on the left and bowered by trees. The road led up an incline to the barracks
square, with the officers’ mess and their quarters on the right. The Colonel’s, Adjutant’s and regimental
offices were in a low white one-storey colonnaded building on the right facing
the square. To the left and right of the
square were two-storey barrack blocks with arched verandahs and external stairs
which housed the gunners of 7 Battery and 38 Battery. The troops’ dining-hall was behind the 38 Battery block and to its left a stone stairway led down
to the white two-storey block housing the gunners of RHQ Troop, to which I’d
been posted.
On the ground floor of this block were the
NAAFI and the NCOs’ bar and mess.
Beyond were assorted other low buildings, like the QM’s stores and the
RSM’s garden and the Vehicle and Gun Parks, where the regiment’s various trucks
and jeeps were garaged and maintained, along with several 25-pounders and three
huge 7.5 inch naval guns arranged in a row, pointing inland and northwards, at
China. As far as I know, we seldom
fired our 25-pounders, except on manoeuvres (which I never attended), the
Regiment being used for guard and policing duties and for keeping an eye on the
Chinese border.
For the next three months I slept in one
of the beds arrayed on both sides of the first floor high-ceilinged barrack
room of RHQ Troop, which had large glass-fronted doors and windows. Toilets and showers, and the stairs, were at
both ends of the block, which had concrete verandahs – no arches here – that
ran the length of the block’s two sides.
Kit inspections were few, though sweeping
and cleaning were daily events. On one
occasion every bunk bed had to be dismantled and the metal parts
repainted. This was done on the Kowloon-side verandah,
where gunners sometimes sun-bathed, sitting on the outer wall or in a chair,
enjoying a smoke and a chat or reading a magazine. There was not much bull in Gun Club. Although we polished our own boots and
shoes, if kit had to be blancoed, brasses polished or uniforms pressed, we left
the items with a Chinese laundry in a shed usefully positioned at the foot of
the stairs that led down to the RHQ Troop block. The Chinese couple who lived there also had
the task of sewing Garrison flashes, or badges (a yellow rooster) on the upper
arms of our battledress tops. In effect
even the ORs had batmen. This invaluable
service only cost a few dollars. We were now paid in Hong
Kong dollars and our meagre pay was also boosted by a Local
Overseas Allowance.
Being a clerk (BIII) I was directed to the
Regimental Office, which was run by Sgt Reynolds, a shortish, smartly kitted,
sallow-faced man, aged about 32, with small dark-brown eyes and a faintly
aggressive manner. There were two other
clerks in the office, which was across the road on the eastern side of the
parade-ground square. My days there were spent in retyping
regimental and standing orders, which had to be retyped when anything was
updated or changed, and in typing out Sitreps and making cups of tea.
Sitreps were Situation Reports
hand-written by an officer observing Chinese activities across the border, most
of which amounted to troop and truck movements, the numbers involved and other
somewhat trivial matters. These
observation posts were manned for 24 hours, and the typing of the Sitrep
reports was a daily chore. Ron Ayee was also in the office until he was
posted elsewhere. Office personnel
changed quite frequently. A Gunner
Anderson was there when I left the office, a nice-looking Scot. Another clerk was Gunner Blanchard, a very
little guy.
A Gunner called Barry – I can’t recall his
surname – once told us assembled clerks at a tea-break, all agog, about the
loss of his virginity during a session with a Chinese tart. Barry had what might once have been a hare-lip
and spoke in a loud rush. What he paid
the tart was irrelevant to us, compared with what he did. He told us he was taken to a room with a bed
and had to wash his penis in a bowl of water.
To prove her own cleanliness the tart showed him a dated card, which
stated that she had been passed as hygienically acceptable, ie, free of the
clap. Adorned with a johnny (a condom,
also known as a rubber or French letter), Barry then did what every man was
supposed to do, especially with a tart, no foreplay needed, and was exceedingly
chuffed with himself and with the novel experience – although it was apparently
rather brief. He made us virgins feel
ashamed.
Chinese tarts were to be seen in certain
bars in Nathan Road,
perched on bar-stools, looking awesomely attractive in their colourful, high-collared,
silk brocade cheongsams slit to the upper thigh. Less attractive and older ones patrolled Austin Road, which
led from Gun Club’s gates to the main north-south thoroughfare of Nathan Road,
garishly neon-lit at night with festoons of Chinese language signs and
thronging with traffic, people, neon-lit open shops, bars and stores. These tarts, as one walked past them, would shrilly
call out ‘Wanky-wanky, Johnny?’
The awful Army warnings in words and
pictures at Oswestry of what VD would do to our very private parts were enforced
by the daily spectacle of a tall gunner from one of the batteries who had
contracted VD. He’d been punished by
being confined to barracks for six months and compelled to wear his full OG
uniform all this time. This was a much
more alarming and cautionary prospect than pictures of rotting pricks.
So we sat in the nearest bar in Nathan Road, the
Chanticleer, and drank our rum and Cokes and looked, but did nothing else -- as
far as I know – although L/Bdr Norman King, who was older and had signed on for
three years, confided on some beery occasion that he had done it more than
once. He was a real man, one the rest
of us admired.
Months later I plucked up courage to enter
the Star Ballroom in Kowloon. This was a large, dark, indoor dance-hall
where you could hire a dance partner for a dollar or two and under the
glitter-ball revolve around the floor for a limited time. You could even, for a few dollars more, do more
with your partner than dance. My chosen
partner was inevitably much smaller than me and neither of us performed, on the
dance-floor, very well. I felt
self-conscious, sinful and unsexy, and fled.
It was not until years later that I
rationalised that my height had a lot to do with my lack of success with girls.
We weren’t on the same companionable level,
embraces were awkward and eye-contact not evenly made. If only I had met a girl who was six foot,
or nearly so, tall, slim and fair-haired.
But for me there were other problems, caused by the physical, mental and
other differences between women and men.
Women were quite different creatures, another species. When I did meet a very tall girl, Vanessa
Redgrave, I was daunted by my poverty and her fame. But
more about that later.
Going out and about in Hong Kong usually
meant walking down Chatham Road or Nathan Road to the Star Ferry at the tip of
the Kowloon peninsula, where loomed the bulk of the grandly imposing six-storey
Peninsula Hotel, ‘the finest hotel east of Suez’. The ferry trip across the harbour was always
a pleasant treat, with so much to look at while savouring the mix of oriental
aromas, of the fuels and cargos of all the ships and boats and the breezes on
the water. I made that journey between Kowloon and the Island
many times.
Civvies were worn in our excursions
outside Gun Club – short-sleeved shirts and slacks, with socks and shoes, even in
the summer. In the winter months I wore
a polo-neck jersey and my dark blue school blazer with a silvered EA on the
chest pocket. Shorts and sandals were
seldom worn. I didn’t acquire any until
the following summer, when I also acquired several made-to-measure shirts and
trousers, measured and made at an Indian tailor’s shop in Chatham Road. I also had two flashy silk brocade
waistcoats made, one red, one silver, and both adorned with chrysanthemums. Later on, I bought some presents for the
family and souvenirs for myself – including a black and gold coffee set, a
teapot in a basket, two Japanese dolls, a painted Chinese landscape, and a
carved ivory chess set. All these extra
purchases added to the load we had to carry with us back to England.
On Hong Kong Island, over the next three
months, I played the tourist, wandering about the crowded streets and visiting
the tourist sites, taking the Peak tram to the top of the Peak, to the
look-out, to admire the spectacular view of the city below and, across the
harbour, of Kowloon and the distant enclosing hills of China – the very same
Technicolour panorama pictured in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Where, I wondered, as the song’s words told
us, was the ‘high and windy hill … where two lovers kissed in the morning mist
and the world stood still?’
Less
romantic was the ornate Tiger
Balm Garden,
with its slim six-storey pagoda, grotesque statuary and grossly lurid and
sculpted scenes of torture and executions.
Buses took me to other places, like Aberdeen Harbour and Wanchai, to the
infrequently frequented beaches at Deep Water Bay and Repulse Bay, where I
sunned myself on a towel and swam, though not for long and not too far out. In the autumn a train at the Kowloon terminus near the Star Ferry took me to Sheung
Shui, the last station before the border with China. A walk along a road leading out of the
village brought me to a bridge across a small river. Was this the border and if so where were the
guards? And would I be shot at? It was unexpectedly peaceful and rural. Peasants wearing broad coolie hats laboured
in little fields, as they had done for centuries, and large brown big-bellied
pigs slumbered on beds of straw.
None of the other squaddies accompanied me
on these trips, and only one or two joined me when I went to see films at the
Star cinema, which was tucked away in a side street behind the Peninsula
Hotel. The other gunners weren’t very
adventurous, and having spent their Thursday pay over the next two nights on
cigarettes, drink and visits to the NAAFI, they tended to lie on their wanking
pits from Sunday onwards complaining about the heat and about having no money
to spend.
At the Star cinema in 1956 I saw and much enjoyed
The Searchers, Forbidden Planet, The King and I, High Society, Bus Stop, Tea
and Sympathy, The Last Wagon, Friendly Persuasion and Written on the Wind among
other movies. Since India, the
magic of movies and musicals, and especially movies of musicals, continued to
entrance me. Rodgers and Hammerstein
were to me the masters in this respect.
The song hits of 1956, played in the NAAFI
or on transistor radios, included No Other Love (Ronnie Hilton), The Poor
People of Paris (Winifred Atwell), I’ll be Home (Pat Boone), Que sera sera
(Doris Day), Lay down your Arms (Anne Shelton), and Just walkin’ in the Rain
(Johnny Ray).
In my trips to the Island
I called on some people whom my mother had arranged for me to visit as useful
civilian contacts in case of some need or emergency. They had connections with the Edinburgh Academy
and my mother must have asked the school to provide her with their names and
addresses and have written to them about my presence in Hong
Kong.
One of these contacts was a married couple
called Chalmers, who were the parents of a sandy-haired boy, two years younger
than me, at the Academy. Ian Chalmers
had sung in the Chorus of Peers in Iolanthe, but I’d never had any contact with
him, because of the age difference and because, being in Houses, he boarded in
one or other of the three houses lining New Field. His parents invited me to their flat on the
Peak for lunch more than once. They had
two small dogs and a Chinese cook-housemaid.
As they were total strangers and middle-aged – the father, Bill
Chalmers, was with a firm called Keller & Co -- I had very little to say to
them, though I must have answered politely when spoken to and thanked them
nicely when, much relieved, I returned to Gun Club.
Ian Chalmers played for the First Fifteen
at the Academy between 1955 and 57, when he left. After that he went to St Andrew’s University
and became a chartered accountant.
Another invitation, for a drink at the
Hong Kong Club on the waterfront, came from Francis Ranken, an unmarried
accountant with Jardine, Matheson, a major Hong Kong
company dealing with shipping, imports and exports. At the
Academy he had been Captain of the First Fifteen, Captain of Athletics, won
various school trophies and was Head Ephor from 1928 to 29. In Hong Kong
he belonged to various clubs and was Secretary of the Country Club. He was
kindly, but to a 19-year-old he seemed aged – he was 45. He asked me if I played golf – I
didn’t. He played at the Hong Kong Golf
Club out at Fanling, which wasn’t far from the Chinese border. He asked if I had been to the Happy Valley
racecourse. But I had little interest
in races of any sort (except the human race) and effete movies and musicals
would not have interested him. Besides,
I was conscious that as a common gunner, and not an officer, I was rather
letting the side down.
And so the first three months after I
arrived in Hong King and began clerking in the Regimental Office at Gun Club
passed by pleasantly enough. But as we moved into May and June and the
summer months heated up, I had seen most of the touristy places I wanted to see
and began to wonder what else I might do to fill my spare time.
There was rather a lot of this, as the
Regiment was now working on summer time, from 7.0 am to 2.0 pm, to avoid the
heat and humidity of sub-tropical afternoons.
This and the lack of privacy were not conducive to writing sonnets or to
any writing at all. Some
air-conditioned indoor occupation elsewhere that involved writing seemed like a
good idea – I was never short of ideas -- and because I was going to study English
at Oxford and thought of myself as having some potential as a writer, one
afternoon I put on a plain white shirt and a plain tie and plain grey trousers
and shiny black shoes and crossed over by the ferry from Kowloon to Hong Kong
Island. Having previously noted from
the local newspaper its address, I presented myself at the downstairs reception
desk of the South China Morning Post.
Even in those days I believed that the
direct and personal approach might have more effect than a letter. On a rainy night many years later I once turned
up at the Westminster home of Sir John Gielgud
to ask him if he would play God or Milton in a staged reading of my
dramatisation of Milton’s
Paradise Lost. ‘Ah, Mr Honeycombe,’ he
exclaimed in that inimitable voice.
‘You’re the awful man who reads the news. I mean – so sorry -- you’re the man who
reads the awful news.’ But that’s
another story.
At the Morning Post’‘s reception desk I
inquired as to whom I should see about being employed there and was directed to
a man in an office, who thought I might be of some use as a sports reporter
covering local football games and the like.
But it was now the height of summer and no such outdoor sporting
activities were taking place. ‘You
might try Radio Hong Kong,’ he said. He
explained that the announcers at Radio Hong Kong were mostly service personnel
and were free-lance, ie, worked there part-time. Reading
was something I had done nearly all my life, and reading aloud on the radio
didn’t sound too difficult or demanding.
I asked him for an address and the name of someone I might see. He said, ‘Try Hilary Green.’
Radio Hong Kong,
in a nondescript building called Electra House on the waterfront, wasn’t far
away. I walked there and asked someone
if Hilary Green, whom I thought must be a man, would see me, and she did. She was slim, short-haired and English.
I told her where I was based in Kowloon and about my A Levels and acting, and about my
projected Oxford
career, and about presenting record requests on a troopship. Seemingly unfazed by my youth and minimal
broadcasting experience, she parked me in a studio in front of a microphone and
I read some continuity announcements that included some awkward foreign
names. This was apparently all she
needed to hear, and Hilary Green asked me if I was free to start next
week. ‘How about Monday?’
I replied that this was all right – although
I’d have to get permission from the regiment to have a spare-time job -- and
explained that I would be free on weekdays during the summer months from 3.0 pm
and every Saturday and Sunday. In the
winter I could probably be at Radio Hong Kong by 5.30 pm or 6.0 during the
week. Whether a contract or letter of agreement
was involved I don’t remember, nor how much I was paid per day. Someone, she said, would show me around and
tell me what was involved, ie, where I would pick up the news and anything else
that needed reading, and where I would sit and read it.
And so, aged 19, I had gone within three
months from being a DJ on a troopship to being a continuity announcer with an
outpost of the BBC in Hong Kong. I was with Radio Hong Kong for about a year.
The Adjutant of the Regiment, Captain
Ryan, whom I was told to see about my extramural appointment (and not our CO,
Colonel Holman) seemed to find the whole matter rather amusing. His merriment made me even more abashed
about my presumption – and anxious that he wouldn’t say ‘No’. Perhaps he was aware (I was not) that the
other announcers at Radio Hong Kong were all Army or Navy officers. I was informed that what I did in my spare
time was up to me, so long as nothing interfered with my regimental duties or tarnished
the good name of the Regiment. I
imagine that he later regaled the Officers’ Mess with a jocular account of one
of the gunners being employed by the BBC.
Radio Hong Kong,
named as such in 1948, although originating 20 years earlier, had been run by
the Government Information Service until 1954, when it became a separate
department, independent of the GIS. It
was on air for three periods during the day – in the morning, at lunchtime, and
in the evening until about 10 pm. News
headlines were sent over every half hour by teleprinter from the GIS HQ, which
also delivered three daily bulletins by hand.
Continuity announcing largely meant reading the news and the weather
forecast and giving programme details of what had just finished and what was
about to start. This would be ad-libbed
from a list of programmes being broadcast that day, although some information
was written for the announcer by whoever produced a particular programme. The weather forecast was obtained by phoning
up the RAF at Kai Tak airport, where the forecasting was done. Shifts lasted for three hours or more, longer
at the weekends.
It was all quite casual and informal,
although you were obliged to wear a tie and be properly dressed – no shorts and
sandals. I would arrive, say ‘Hello’
and ‘Goodbye’ to the captain or whatever officer I was replacing, or who was
replacing me, and settle down to check through what was being broadcast on my
shift. My colleagues naturally assumed that I was an
officer, like them. After all, I spoke
like them.
Radio Hong Kong
originated some local programmes, like variety shows and radio plays, talks and
interviews. John Wallace was the main
presenter, and a bosomy woman called Linda presented an hour of record requests
every week. I sent her a couple of my
own and when my after-hours job became generally known at Gun Club, I was asked
by some squaddies to pass on requests to Linda. One was to Georgina
who, unknown to me at the time, was one of our gunners. He complained to someone and I was
questioned but contrived not to reveal the name of the perpetrator of this
prank.
John Wallace was an extrovert, compact and
affable man, married to a Chinese woman, with four or five children. He can be seen as the Police Inspector in
the film Ferry to Hong Kong, which was
released in 1959 and starred Curt Jurgens, Sylvia Sims and Orson Welles. They were casting the film in 1957 and there
was a remote chance I might have been in it.
But I had to return to England
in August 1957 to be demobbed. The
director, Lewis Gilbert, said the making of the film, in Hong
Kong, was ‘a nightmare’, mainly because of Orson Welles.
I almost got into another film, The
Seventh Sin, which was based on the Somerset Maugham novel, The Painted
Veil. The film was made in studios in England in 1957, but some general and background
scenes were shot in Hong Kong. For this a stand-in was needed for the
leading actor, Bill Travers. John
Wallace or someone at Radio Hong Kong must have suggested me for this job as I
was the same height as Bill Travers, six feet four, and at a distance, seen
from the back in long shot, might pass as him, although he was 14 years older
than me. One scene would have involved
me getting into an open-topped car with a female stand-in and driving off. But I had no licence and couldn’t
drive. So that was that.
Two years earlier, while I was still at
school, I might also have stood in for him in another film, Geordie, which was
about a simple Scottish youth who ended up shot-putting at the Olympic
Games. Somehow, my name was put
forward, but I was then too young and far from well-built – Bill Travers had
been an officer with the Gurkhas in WW2.
Oddly enough he actually entered my life in 1962, when we were both in
the Royal Shakespeare Company. But more
about that later.
I later appeared in several films, most of
which were badly made and short-lived.
The best of this bunch were The Medusa Touch and The Fourth Protocol, in
which I was, respectively, a TV newsreader, and a television interviewer who
interviewed Alan Rickman. The stars
were, respectively, Richard Burton and Michael Caine. As my brief segments were shot in mock
television studios, I never met either of them – although years later I did
meet Michael Caine on the set of possibly the worst film Michael Winner ever
made, Bullseye! This time I played a television reporter, on
location at Mortlake in South London.
My finest performance in a film, as the
sinister leader of a cult that staged orgies in a forest, remains unseen, as
the film, made in Perth, Western Australia in April 2008, has never
been shown.
I was never destined to be a movie star,
or a leading actor. Little did I know
or begin to imagine what I was really destined for as a result of my year with
Radio Hong Kong.
Having unexpectedly and accidentally succeeded
at being employed as a radio announcer, I decided to test what I considered to
be my real talents by taking a very minor part in a radio play produced at
Radio Hong Kong and by entering two singing competitions.
One was a talent show called Beginners Please,
which was presented by John Wallace, live, in the only studio we had. I sang The Hippopotamus Song by Flanders and Swann and surprisingly won that round. For the Final of the competition some weeks
later, I sang a number I’d written myself, words and music, The Crocodile
Song. This didn’t become a Number One
hit, nor did I win the Final. I was
third.
The following year I was asked to write
the words and music for a new signature tune for Beginners Please. I felt
I couldn’t and shouldn’t compete again.
A trio played the music and two Chinese girls sang, while John Wallace
pretended to be winding a hurdy-gurdy -- ‘You’re on the air now, the show has
started. Don’t be down-hearted,
beginners please. Come on and do your
best, it’s up to you now. This is your
cue now, beginners please!’ I thought
it apt and cheerful. I still do.
In another competition, which was held in
a vast cinema on the Island and included some Chinese contestants, I sang, with
a piano accompanying me, The Surrey with the Fringe on Top from Oklahoma! I
wore an open-necked shirt, a cravat and my trusty blazer and looked pretty
snazzy. But not as pretty, sweet and
sexy as the Chinese girl who came first.
I was second. There was a prize
of some sort. It might have been a tie.
There was no holding me. Having heard or read about auditions for a
forthcoming production of The Merchant of Venice in November 1956 I turned up at
an audition and astonished the director with my dynamic characterisations of
Malvolio and Brutus. The play was the
first production of an amateur set-up called The Shakespeare Company and I was
cast as the romantic lead, Bassanio.
The others in the cast were teachers, service personnel and
church-goers. We rehearsed in a church
hall in Jordan Road. The flimsy though colourful costumes were
vaguely Elizabethan. The set was all
drapes and curtains. Bassanio is not a
very rewarding part and I wasn’t very good, though I spoke loudly and with feigned
passion. I’m not blaming her for my
unconvincing performance, but my Portia, with whom I was supposed to be in
love, happened to be my Colonel’s wife. Yes, Dreda Holman was not only Colonel
Holman’s wife, she had a glass eye. The
eye was slightly askew -- and I didn’t know where to look.
She was also much smaller than me and
probably old enough to be my mother. It
wasn’t easy pretending I was in love with her.
We held hands but fortunately I never had to kiss her. If I had, I’m sure – Colonel Holman attended
the first night -- I would have been court-martialled and taken out and shot.
The largely Chinese audiences – and we
played six shows in school halls in Kowloon and
on Hong Kong Island – were quite disconcerting. They
laughed in all the wrong places and the girls couldn’t restrain their squeals
and titters when I towered over Portia and professed my love for her. The
Officers Mess when they heard about this must also have had a few hearty
laughs. But no reference to this ill-matched pairing
was ever made within my hearing in Gun Club.
Fortunately none of the squaddies saw the production or knew about
it. Or so I thought.
In 1994 I received a letter from a
Charles Worthing in Cheltenham (where else
would a Charles Worthing live?). He had
actually seen the aforesaid production.
He wrote, ‘I was with the Royal Signals attached to the Royal
Artillery. They were good days if you
went out of the barracks, and involved yourself in the colony … I can remember
Tom Cross (Antonio) and Margaret Whittle (Jessica) who both attended the same
church – Kowloon Union.’ Margaret, he
said, was a young American, who ‘made many a young serviceman’s heart flutter.’ As it
happened, it wasn’t Jessica who made my heart flutter, if nothing else, but
Nerissa, who was Portia’s attendant.
She was played by Janet Cottrell, a
statuesque beauty from a civilian family.
She had done some modelling, parading as a mannequin at the Peninsula
Hotel. We enjoyed a few jokey chats
during rehearsals and backstage during the show, and I plucked up courage and
asked her out. We may have gone to the
cinema and afterwards had a drink.
Then, being a gentleman, in the days when a gentleman opened doors for
ladies and stood up when they entered a room, I escorted her, by taxi, back to
her home. I paid for this of course, as
well as for any cinema tickets and drinks – as a gentleman should. And when I said goodbye, rather hastily as
the taxi was waiting and the meter ticking away, we managed a sloppy kiss.
There
was no morning mist and the Four Aces weren’t singing in the shrubbery, but
there was a fleeting sensation as if fingers had ‘touched my silent heart and
taught it how to sing.’ She gave me her
phone number, but I never rang. I was
but a lowly, impoverished gunner and she a lady. Besides, I couldn’t afford her. She was
out of my league, socially and financially.
When I returned to Gun Club that night and
was checked in at the guard-room, the sergeant on duty barked, ‘What’s that on
your collar?’ It was rosy, smudgy lipstick, and it seemed
for a moment as if I would be put on a charge.
Could lipstick on your collar be a punishable offence, like contracting
an awful disease? But after a few
sarcastic remarks the grinning sergeant let me go. And as I crossed the parade ground, I
fancied that the Four Aces sang triumphantly from 7 Battery’s
verandah that love was ‘the golden crown that makes a man a king.’ I felt good.
Here I must pause and backtrack. For the sergeant in the guard-room was Sgt
Hall, which means that by this time I was not only 20 but that my work and
domestic circumstances had completely changed.
The CO who wrote the short Testimonial on
the back of my Army Book 111 when I was discharged from the Army, said, apart
from the fact that my Military Conduct was ‘VERY GOOD’, that I had been
‘employed as RHQ Troop clerk for one year’ – a post which, he said, I had
carried out efficiently. As he signed
the Testimonial on 14 August 1957, I must have become the RHQ Troop clerk in
August 1956, if not before. The CO went
on to say, ‘He has spent much of his spare time working for Radio Hong Kong as
an announcer and is also a popular entertainer at troop activities.’
These ‘activities’ were Troop Smokers,
held in the NAAFI, at which various gunners and NCOs sang, played the piano and
told jokes. I don’t recall anything
about being popular or an entertainer or any such troop activities. I wonder why. It seems that we only remember the odd and
unusual occurrence or person, the one-off or special event, and not things that
occur more than once.
I stood out among the gunners of course,
being exceedingly tall (and quite dishy, though I say so myself) and was
sometimes greeted by appreciative wolf-whistles from squaddies leaning on 38 Battery’s verandah as I walked across the parade-ground. I should have given them an energetic
two-finger V in response (not one finger, as happens now), but I ignored them
and proceeded on my lofty, impervious way.
One of those 38 Battery squaddies would
become an actor, and several years later he played the captain of a football
club in the Midlands in a BBC1 twice-weekly TV series called United!, first
shown in 1965. I was particularly
interested in this series as six months or more before this I had sent the
synopsis of an idea for a TV series to the BBC. It was about a football club in the Midlands and was called United! I wrote accusatory letters, but of course I
couldn’t prove that the creators of the series had read my synopsis. It was just ‘an unfortunate coincidence’
according to the BBC.
Something similar happened in the 80s when
I sent off the synopsis of a TV series set in a London fire-station, called Red Watch after
the best-selling story I’d written. I sent the idea to London Weekend
Television. In 1986 the first episode of a long-running
series about a London fire-station, called London’s Burning,
appeared, produced by LWT. But that’s another story.
In the BBC TV series called United! the
captain of the football club was played by Bryan Marshall. One night, after a variety show at Joan
Littlewood’s Theatre Royal at Stratford East in London in 1974, I had bought a
couple of pints in the bar and was making my way through the press of people
when I came face to face with the aforesaid Bryan Marshall. He grinned cheerfully and said, ‘15 Medium,
Hong Kong, 1956,’ and went away. Much intrigued I buttonholed him, and he told
me he had been in Hong Kong with 15 Medium and had watched my progress across
the parade-ground from 38 Battery’s upper
verandah, and when I appeared on television reading the news he had recognised
me as RHQ Troop’s lofty gunner. He had
appeared in the film version of Quatermass and the Pit, made in 1967, and would
play Lancelot in my dramatisation of Lancelot and Guinevere. But that’s also another story.
As the RHQ Toop clerk I would have been
crossing the parade-ground in order to leave a copy of the Troop’s Orders of
the Day, which I’d typed myself, at my previous place of clerical employment,
the Regimental Office. Obviously the RHQ Troop clerk before me had
returned to Blighty, been posted elsewhere or was in jail -- which was why I
was given the job. This must have
happened early in August or towards the end of July, and before I joined Radio
Hong Kong.
The Troop Office was a small three-door
building with a narrow verandah situated below the western end of the 38 Battery block. Nearby was the MT (Motor Transport) Office,
run by Lt Thomas and Sgt Poore, and a parking area for trucks and jeeps. The Troop Commander, Captain Everson, had an
office to himself at one end of the Troop Office, which opened into the main
office. At the other end of the building
was small room occupied by Lt Keefe.
Sgt Hall ran the office, assisted by me, and Sgt Badger ran the Troop,
assisted by Bdr Blackham, L/Bdr King and some subsidiary NCOs.
A motley crew of signallers, cooks,
drivers, general duty gunners, the staff of the QM stores and the RSM’s
gardener all belonged to RHQ Troop.
Most paraded informally every morning outside the office and the whole
Troop lined up together every Thursday afternoon to be paid.
For reasons to do with security and
general usefulness, like answering the phone, the RHQ Troop clerk slept on the
premises, as I now began to do. Behind
an L-shaped arrangement of cupboards and a locker masking a corner of the
office, there was a single bed below a barred window facing the back. The locker faced the bed and was where I
kept my military gear, civilian clothes and other possessions. The cupboards, facing the other way, into
the office, contained all sorts of stationery.
Although showers and toilets were now at a distance, I was able to get
some water from an outdoor tap, fill a bowl with it and wash my face and hands
and do my teeth. It was good to have
some privacy and a space of my own.
A small desk below the barred window
facing the front was where I did my typing and other clerical work. Sgt Hall had a desk on my right, opposite
the entrance door. He wore glasses, was
plump, sharp-voiced and fussy, and could be rather irascible. This was rumoured to be because he suffered
from painful piles. Perhaps that’s why
he stood with his feet wide apart. He
wasn’t married. Sgt Badger was, and
although he never shouted or swore, his brown-button eyes wore a permanently
worried look. Something always seemed to be making him
harassed and anxious.
We all had every reason to be worried at
the time of the October riots.
Refugees from mainland China had been
fleeing to Hong Kong from the Communist regime for many years, with the result
that over two million people were now crammed into the colony. Huge tower blocks to accommodate the
newcomers had sprouted all over Kowloon and the New Territories. Following a Nationalist festival celebrating
the 1911 October revolution and the subsequent tearing down by some Communists of
some of Nationalist flags, the Nationalists began assaulting pro-Communist
persons and ransacking and burning their properties and shops. This began on Wednesday, 10 October in an
area a few miles north of Kowloon.
But then the rioting spread to other areas
and into Kowloon
city itself. Several Communists were
killed and not a few badly beaten. A
taxi was set on fire on Nathan
Road, and the passenger, the Swiss Consul’s wife,
later died of her burns. British troops
and armoured cars were ordered out to assist the Hong Kong
police in controlling and dispersing the rioters – the police had orders to
fire on the mobs – and by 12 October the rioting had subsided. But over those three days 15 people were
killed by the rioters and 44 by the police.
Hundreds of people were injured.
It must have been on the night of the 11th
that Bdr Blackham and Bdr Chilton and myself sat in the RHQ Troop Office armed
with loaded .303 rifles and two Sten guns and enough ammunition to repel any
invasion of Gun Club Hill. The
perimeter fence, which was all that stood between us and the rioters, was about
50 yards away. Beyond the fence the
hill sloped down to the Kowloon Cricket Club.
We could hear sporadic shooting and outbursts of yelling and shouting in
the area of Nathan Road. It was alarming, and although we had a phone,
no one informed us what was happening or if we were in any danger. Our task was to guard the premises and
repulse any attempt by rioters to break through the perimeter fence.
What scared me most, however, was Bdr
Chilton. He had previously served in Malaya, and a friend of his had been killed in the
anti-British guerrilla warfare, Communist-inspired, that had been fought there
since 1948. He sat at Sgt Hall’s desk
cuddling a Sten gun, tense and silent, his eyes glazed and staring, more than ready
to kill any slant-eyed person who came in sight.
Eventually the distant sounds of mayhem
ceased and Bombardiers Blackham and Chilton departed. I locked all the doors, closed all the
windows and lay on my bed with a loaded rifle within reach.
The riots were front page news in Britain, and families were much concerned that
their sons were all right in riot-torn Hong Kong. Some sent telegrams; some phoned; and all of
them wrote. I believe my mother phoned
Francis Ranken, who reassured her and urged me to write to say I was OK. This I did.
She wrote regularly, my father and my sister hardly at all. I wasn’t very good at writing letters home,
as there was really very little to say, once I had settled into an office
routine and into Radio Hong Kong. My
acting and singing would have been dealt with in a sentence or two, as would
any touristy excursions, and I seldom covered more than two sides of a
page.
Events elsewhere soon pushed our little
bit of local bother aside as the Suez Crisis began on 22 October, as did the
Hungarian revolution the following day.
The Russians invaded Hungary
on 26 October and on the 31st Britain
and France began bombing Egypt, intending to frighten Egypt into re-opening the Suez
Canal, which had been taken over by President Nasser in July. On 5 November Anglo-French troops landed at Port Said, by which time
the Canal had been blocked by the wrecks of over 40 ships and wouldn’t be
re-opened until April the following year.
It
was also in November that a very unexpected assault on my virtue coincided with
the start, in Melbourne,
of the Olympic Games.
I was on leave, my first such break since
arriving in Hong Kong, and was staying for about five days in the China Fleet
Club on the Island, a sort of YMCA. This must have happened at the conclusion of
The Merchant of Venice and was therefore about the middle of November – the
Olympic Games began on 22 November.
Most of my holiday time would have been
spent idling about the Island, in civvies, and
one day, for something to do, I took the Peak Tram to the Peak. As I looked about and admired the panoramic
view, a man who’d been doing likewise over on my left came up to me and
initiated a conversation, asking me about Hong Kong and myself. An American, aged about 30, tall, solidly
built, pale-faced and dark-haired, he had stopped off in Hong Kong on his way
to Melbourne
for the Olympics and was staying at the Peninsula Hotel. He asked me what there was to do and see in Hong Kong and where you could go for a gay time.
Not
knowing any other meaning for ‘gay’ other than happy and carefree, I replied
that there were several bars which might provide some fun and entertainment,
and named one or two. The American also
asked me about myself, where I lived and worked, but I was reluctant, having
signed the Official Secrets Act, to give such information to a person from a
foreign country and was suitably vague.
Among the other places I suggested he visit was the border with China – though
not for a gay time there -- and told him how to get there by train. He thought this was a great idea and asked
me if I would accompany him, as he had never been in Hong Kong before, was on
his own, and unsure about what to do.
As I had nothing planned, I agreed to meet him the following morning at
the Railway Station terminus on Kowloon,
across the road from the Peninsula Hotel.
He was effusively grateful.
The train journey, for which he insisted
on paying, was uneventful. But there
was something about him and the things he said that began to make me feel
uncomfortable. And he stared at me
rather a lot. At Sheung Shui we went
for a walk, to a flimsy barrier across a road that led to China, and as he didn’t seem very interested in
the fields and pigs and peasants, and as I was beginning to feel uneasy, I
suggested we return to Kowloon
by bus, rather then wait for the next train.
So we boarded a single-decker country bus full of Chinese people and
sat, not on a two-seater, but on a four-seater facing another of the same
across the bus, on which sat an aged crone clutching a couple of large bags and
a chicken in a wicker basket. By this
time I had become quite unhappy about the American’s interest in me – at one
point he put his hand on my knee – and spoke briefly and curtly, if at all.
We were being jolted about on our seat as
the bus noisily rattled along, with the old crone opposite regarding us with a
beady eye, when my companion said, ‘I sure would like to seduce you.’
Nothing could be plainer. My face flamed and I was dumb for the rest
of the journey, and incapable of looking at him. However, on leaving the train in Kowloon I did my British best to thank him for the journey
and hoped he had a nice time in Melbourne. He was rather insistent that I came with him
to the Peninsula Hotel for a drink, and offered to give me a massage in his
room. I politely declined, implying that some
pressing regimental business had to be attended to and after shaking his hand
walked resolutely away.
Curiously I saw him again, after the
Olympic Games had ended on 8 December.
I was crossing over in a Star Ferry to Hong Kong,
when I saw him on one of the seats at the front of the ferry with a young man,
evidently an off-duty soldier, beside him.
He turned, saw me and gaily waved.
I glued my gaze on the harbour.
I’m sure he was in two minds as to whether to abandon his new companion
and renew an old acquaintance. But a
bird in the hand was better than the frost that covered me, and he stayed where
he was.
In the queue to get off the boat when we
reached Hong Kong I was among the first,
shoving the Chinese passengers out of my way.
Innocence provides a degree of
protection. I was aware, from
newspapers and books, that men did things with other men, but what these things
were I had no idea. I didn’t have much
of a clue about what men did with women, or realised then that every squaddie
knew all about that town in China. Two lance-bombardiers in RHQ Troop were
alleged to be more than mates, but that was dismissed as an aberration rather
than something unnatural and abhorrent.
After all, the two in question, to all appearances, were normal, nice
young men, and just like the rest of us.
The Troop did, however, contain not a few
oddball characters among the signallers, drivers and cooks. Not a few had odd names (apart from me) like
Twort and Glew, and there was Mouse, Gunner Lovegrove – so called because he
had ears that stuck out, was small and had neat and perky features. His mate was Gunner Luckett. The RSM’s gardener, Geoff Cripps, was deemed
to be somewhat eccentric, being ex-public school, a loner, lean and scruffy and
softly spoken. The NCOs tended to
socialise together and of course they had their own mess.
I could have become an NCO, as it was felt
in the Troop Office that the Troop Clerk should have a stripe – the previous
clerk had been a lance-bombardier. But
when the matter was raised with me I declined the offer. I didn’t want to be promoted, to give
orders, to be put in charge of such duties such as Fire Picquets or to
socialise in the NCOs Mess. Fire Picquets required a small squad of
gunners to parade in working gear after work and remain in the barracks on
stand-by throughout the night, otherwise carrying on as normal. I preferred the undemanding company of the
gunners, and the circumstances of where I worked involved a sufficient amount
of social interaction.
Most of the Troop had special mates, with
whom they sat at meal-times or in the NAAFI or drank with when they went out
for a night on the town. Being the
Troop Clerk I knew everyone by name and accompanied some on their nightly
forays – when possible, as in the evenings and at weekends I might be doing a
shift at Radio Hong Kong. As I didn’t
live with the rest of the Troop in the barrack block, I generally only
socialised with them when we all met for a meal.
My chief mates were Danny Penman and Nobby
Clarke. Danny came from Kirkcaldy in Fife. He was a
miner, as his father had been, and had done some boxing, trained by his father,
who had been a lightweight champion. He
was one of those Scots with fine pale hair and a pale face. Of
averge height, he had a solid build and when speaking, with a throaty Scottish
accent, hardly opened his mouth. Nobby
was a Northerner, with a high colouring and large soulful eyes. He was the lively and funny one of the pair. We usually just went out for a drink at one
of the bars like the Chanticleer in Nathan
Road. Rum
and Coke was a favoured drink, not beer.
December saw the big event of the St
Barbara’s Day Parade, when all the RA Regiments and other elements in Hong Kong
paraded on an air-strip in outer Kowloon. The parade was followed by a march-past and,
it being winter, best battle-dress, boots, berets and belts were worn. St Barbara was the patron saint of
artillerymen. Her feast day was on 4
December, when she was martyred by being tortured and then beheaded by her own
father, who was punished by the Almighty by being struck by lightning and
consumed by flames. Thus the
association with the explosive impact of artillery shells.
I didn’t take part in this parade –
someone had to remain in Gun Club. But
on another occasion, when both Batteries and RHQ Troop paraded and were
inspected on the parade-ground between the Battery
blocks at Gun Club, I disgraced myself, and the Regiment, by fainting.
I don’t think we’d been standing for very
long, but my vision and mind began misting over and I felt nauseous. I must
have begun to sway. But before anyone could yell ‘Timber!’ as I
fell full-length on the concrete, some NCO grabbed me and dragged me aside,
where he sat me down to one side and pushed my head down between my knees. When I had partially recovered he led me
away. No charges ensued, and as far as
remember, nothing was said about my lapse.
One permanent feature of the
parade-ground, except during the winter, was the ice-cream man. He was Chinese, and in the afternoon would park
his bicycle under a large tree near the western side-steps to 38 Battery’s lower verandah. Panniers attached to the bicycle were
crammed with ice-cooled boxes of ice-cream and cones. I could see him from my bed-space window and
would nip out to buy ice-creams for myself and Sgt Hall.
Life could sometimes seem very good. We were fed well, slept well, worked not overmuch,
and there was the NAAFI and occasional outings and entertainments within Gun
Club as well as a variety of bars, cinemas and other diversions in Kowloon. We had few cares or responsibilities. We led structured, cared-for lives – and we
were paid. Not a lot, but enough.
At Christmas, the Regiment was given a few
days off, and on Christmas Day, a Tuesday, the ORs were served by the officers,
as was traditional in the Army. They
provided us with plates of roast chicken, roast potatoes, vegetables, stuffing,
plum pudding, trifle and large bottles of San Miguel beer. Coloured streamers dangled overhead. But
the occasion wasn’t that informal as our best battledress uniforms had to be
worn and the officers drank at a long table at one end of the room.
On New Year’s Eve, I went out with Danny Penman
and Nobby Clarke. Danny being Scottish
and I three-quarters Scottish we felt a need to celebrate Hogmanay. Several bars were visited, one of which
would have been the Chanticleer, and eight or nine rums and Coke were
drunk. We weaved our way back to Gun
Club by midnight, and when I reached my bed in the Troop Office I retched
horribly into the bowl I used for washing my face and hands. It was the first time this had happened to
me and the ghastly feeling of my guts trying to disgorge themselves via my
mouth was something in the future I tried to avoid.
Early in 1957 I received a letter which my
mother had forwarded to me from Edinburgh. The letter was from Roy Honeycombe and he
was replying, a year late, to a letter I had written to him in September
1955. Before I left Edinburgh to begin my National Service
duties, my mother had noticed a wedding announcement in the Evening News about
the marriage on 3 September of a Roy Honeycombe and Evelyn Vinestock. And he lived in Jersey in the Channel Islands.
Another Honeycombe! I had no
brothers, neither had my father, apart from his half-brother, Lal, and
grandfather Honeycombe’s only brother had died unmarried. As far as I knew I was the last of the
Honeycombes. Was I connected to this
Jersey Honeycombe, even related to him?
With
my curiosity aroused, before I left Edinburgh I
found out this Roy’s
address from the bride’s mother by telephoning her – there weren’t many
Vinestocks in the telephone directory.
Then I wrote to him, asking if he knew anything about his ancestry. There was no reply. And
that was that. It wasn’t until January
1957 that his reply, via my mother, arrived.
He said that my letter had been misplaced
and not unearthed until after Christmas 1956.
He knew relatively little about his family. His father had been a telephone linesman;
his grandfather, Samuel, had been a stonemason in St Helier in Jersey before becoming the town crier. He believed that the Honeycombes had
originated in Cornwall.
To prove this he sent me a copy of a
little printed booklet entitled A brief abstract of the ancient Cornish surname
of Honeycombe, which had been written by an American, John Symons Honeycombe of
New Jersey,
in 1907. It told how the family was
founded by a noble companion of William the Conqueror, called Honi à Combat,
who was granted vast lands in Devon and Cornwall. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a Honicombe, as
the spelling had become, built Honeycombe Hall at Calstock in Cornwall., and
married into a rich landowning family called Symons – from whom this John in America
was allegedly directly descended. In
the 18th century both families had apparently bought estates in the
nearby parish of St Cleer, where John Symons Honeycombe was born in 1833. My father, I now recalled, had a typed copy
of this booklet, which I’d thought was a fiction. Could any of it be true?
I resolved that one day I would visit Roy in Jersey and also travel down to Cornwall to investigate whether any part of
this legend of the Cornish Honeycombes had any basis in reality and fact.
Even
then I was struck by the elements of coincidence and chance in all of this – by
Roy’s marriage being in Edinburgh,
by my mother drawing my attention to the announcement, by my letter being lost
then found, and by the Jersey connection. For I knew my Great-Aunt Emma had been a
visitor there and had probably acquired a copy of the booklet, which in turn
had been copied by my father. I had
read what he had typed and thought it all seemed rather unlikely -- a Norman
knight was said to be the original Honeycombe, and there was a house in Cornwall called
Honeycombe Hall. Really? Further investigations would have to wait
until I returned to the UK.
That return wasn’t so far away now. For in nine months’ time I would return by
sea to civilisation. By this time I was
a confident and competent soldier and continuity announcer on the radio. Life in Hong Kong
in 1957 proceeded more or less on an even keel, until I was placed on a charge.
Every now and then some gunner, cook or
signaller would be charged with some minor and occasionally major
misdemeanour. The accused was briskly
marched into the Troop Commander’s office by Sgt Hall and stood stiffly at
attention while the charge was read out and considered and an appropriate
punishment pronounced. In my case I was
charged with the offence of not saluting an officer.
The day before this I was walking past the
cookhouse and saw that a person was approaching me on my right about 30 yards
away. He was wearing a cap but his
insignia were too far away to be seen. He was also not known to me. Suddenly he yelled at me. ‘Come here!’ he shouted. Fearfully I did so, recognising him now as a
captain in one of the Batteries. He
accused me of ignoring him and not saluting him and demanded to know why. I said that without my glasses – ‘I’m
putting you on a charge,’ he snarled.
‘What’s your name?’ I remembered
to salute him before slinking away.
It was embarrassing to be barked at by Sgt
Hall and marched into Captain Everson’s office and to hear the charge being
read out – Failure to Salute an Officer.
‘Have you anything to say?’ Everson asked, sitting behind his desk and
blandly looking up at me as I stood at attention before him. I tried to explain, unconvincingly, that without
my glasses I couldn’t see details at a distance. ‘Confined to barracks,’ said Everson. ‘For two days.’ And Sgt Hall marched me briskly out.
Although the even tenor of my days was
disturbed for about a week, it wasn’t the end of the world and this blot on my
escutcheon never appeared in my Service Record. The incident probably occurred the previous
year, when I was fairly new to the Troop Office and to Gun Club.
Something that does appear on my Service
Record is the fact that I became a Clerk (GD) BII on 29 March, having passed
whatever course and tests I had to do to achieve this. This advancement must have been at the
suggestion of others, possibly Sgt Hall, and I may have gone along with it as my
Army pay would have been given a boost.
And then, a few weeks later, I was back in
Captain Everson’s office.
One morning Sgt Hall said, more quietly
than usual, that the Troop Commander would like to see me. Something about the Orders of the Day, I
thought, or there was some message to be conveyed. Again I stood before Captain Everson.
‘At ease,’ he said. Looking up at me he continued, ‘I have some
rather bad news for you, I’m afraid. A
Mr Francis Rankin has telephoned me and asked me to tell you that your father
has died. He received the information
from your mother and thought that I should be the one to tell you personally
rather than over the phone.’
What do you say or do when someone tells
you that your father has died? It was a
shock. You never think that someone
you’ve known all your life will not be there any more. Although a grandmother, an aunt and a cousin
had died I had seldom seen them. They
and their deaths meant little to me as a result. But my father! Nothing and no one prepares you for this,
especially when you’re young, and I didn’t know how to react, or what to
say. So I just stood there, struck dumb, and stared
blankly out of the barred window behind Everson’s desk.
He was still talking. He may have said something about the date of
the funeral and he naturally presumed that it would impossible for me to return
by air to Scotland
in time for it. He expressed his
commiserations and asked me if I would like to be excused duties for the rest
of the day. I said something about it
being better if I carried on working. And
I did so, in a daze, and Sgt Hall and Sgt Badger were kind and considerate that
day, a Monday, and for the rest of the week.
By this time my mother was living at 4
Inverleith Terrace, which bordered the southern side of the Botanic
Gardens. She wrote and told me that my
father had died on 14 April, which happened to be Palm Sunday. He had been taken to a hospital a week or so
before this and died there of complications caused by pneumonia and emphysema. He would have been 59 in July. He was buried at Morningside
Cemetery in Edinburgh.
Few people attended the short service at the graveside. My sister didn’t attend, as she was heavily
pregnant and the funeral would have upset her.
No gravestone was erected as my mother couldn’t afford one. But a
kind of memorial would be inscribed to him in far away Karachi.
It wasn’t until I spent a weekend in
Karachi in August 1982 that I learned that someone in the Sind Club had got to
hear, via Standard Vac or a newspaper’s list of deaths, that GS Honeycombe, a
member of the Club since 1922, had died, and a line had been carefully ruled
through his name in a printed, alphabetical list of the Club’s members. Someone had then neatly added beside his name
– ‘Died in UK
14/4/57.’ The little book containing
the history of the Sind Club and the list of members was produced for me by the
Club’s Secretary, a former Indian Air Force officer with a handsome moustache
who spoke perfect English. I was
touched and impressed that my father’s passing had been commemorated in this
way, and when asked by the Secretary to dinner that night, had the satisfaction
of dining on the Club’s terrace, where my father must have spent many enjoyable
hours, and raised a glass in memory of him and of all the years he had spent in
India. Although nothing alcoholic was
now permitted to be drunk in Pakistan,
the Secretary generously provided French wine and brandy with the meal, and
beforehand a chota peg.
Many years later, I learned that my father
had made his Will ten years before he died, on 20 June 1947. In this he left his estate, after debts and
funeral expenses had been paid, to ‘my beloved wife.’ If she predeceased him, the estate went to
his son and daughter. The Will was
witnessed by two of his colleagues at the Standard Vacuum Oil Company, and four
days after he died a letter, enclosing a cheque for $448.46, was sent to my
mother by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company at Madison Avenue in New York. They informed her that his life insurance
amounted to $10,400 and that they intended to send it to her in 36 monthly
instalments over the next three years.
Somebody, a Scottish lawyer (who wrote in the margin of that letter
‘bad, over 10 yrs’) advised her to ask Metropolitan to spread the payments over
the next ten years, and this they agreed to do. As from September 1957 she received monthly
instalments of $101.71. The last payment
would be in March 1967. These payments,
thanks to my father’s foresight, would save her from penury, and indirectly saved
me from having to take some job I didn’t want and to lead a humdrum, pedestrian
life, far different from the one I eventually did.
In England
when my father died, Aunt Donny, his sister, was rehearsing an amateur
production in Bournemouth of a play called, of
all things, Portrait in Black. The dress rehearsal was on a Sunday
afternoon. She knew her older brother
was very ill.
In the third part of her autobiography,
Memories, she wrote, ‘The dress rehearsal was a long drawn-out business and I
was glad when at last it was over … I was tired when I reached my home in
Hurlingham and made a pot of tea to revive me.
My thoughts were of Gordon, and I was thinking of phoning for the latest
news when the telephone rang. The call
was from the hospital. I was told in
the kindest possible way that Gordon’s condition had deteriorated rapidly. He had died a few hours ago … I was
completely shattered.’
As Donny had visited him in hospital the
previous week, having travelled overnight to Edinburgh by train, my mother persuaded her
not to come north again. Besides, there was the play, which opened the
following night, on 15 April, and there were no understudies. My aunt wrote in her Memories, ‘Louie did
not want me to make the long journey north so soon after my last visit. I had seen Gordon then and there was nothing
more I could do. Louie said she would
prefer that I waited until after Marion’s
baby was born – it was due in May.
Gordon’s funeral would be a very simple one, she said, with only the
family and a few close friends there.’
So Donny went ahead with a week of
performances of Portrait in Black and I went back to work.
I felt that I, as his only son, should
have been at his funeral, to pay my respects and to honour his life. He had given life to me. There had been no proper farewell, and I had
not even been told by my mother that he had been hospitalised and was very
ill. Although there had been little
interchange between us, he was part of my small family. Now there was a gap, and we were lessened by
his absence. He had gone. Not being religious I didn’t go to a church
and I didn’t pray. But I thought about
him more than I had ever done and wondered, if he had lived, whether we would
ever have talked about his life, his hopes and dreams, and mine. I
wonder now what he would have thought about what I did with my life and what I
achieved. I had taken his name and now
there was only one of us. But one day his name at least would be nationally
well-known.
In April 1957 the Suez
Canal was re-opened to shipping after being cleared of wrecked and
damaged ships that were blocking the waterway. Sir
Anthony Eden had resigned in January when the Suez Crisis came to a messy and
inglorious end and had been replaced as Prime Minister by Harold
Macmillan. Now that the Canal was
traversable again, ships no longer needed to use the old and longer route
around the Cape of Good Hope to reach India
and the Far East, and this meant that the troopship taking me back to England via the Canal would sail from Hong Kong about the middle of August. Suddenly my departure didn’t seem so far
away. I began looking ahead.
Apart from still writing the occasional
sonnet I had been thinking about writing a novel. But about what? The only thing I knew anything about was
school. Other school stories I had read
had been about English boarding-schools, like Alec Waugh’s vivid The Loom of
Youth. No one had written about a Scottish
school, as far as I knew, nor about a school in a city. But what would be the story and who would it
be about? I had been impressed by the
novels of Virginia Woolf that I’d been advised to read in my last year at the
Academy and began to devise a story that covered a week in the last school term
of six main characters, a story told without any narration and only through dialogue
and their thoughts. It wasn’t very
long; it read like a play-script and was called All Our Yesterdays. When a TV programme some years later
appeared with that name, I renamed my story Moving On. This was later altered to Green Boy, Green
Boy – a title taken from some apposite lines in a poem, Sketches for a
Portrait, by C Day Lewis.
It was while I was in Hong
Kong that I began writing my school story in long-hand, in an A4
sized notebook. I continued working on it during the vacations
of my first year at Oxford
and it was typed on my father’s Remington typewriter and finished in 1958 while
I was still 21.
All
the books and plays I’ve written have been hand-written and later typed – all
except this Memoir. I found it
impossible to create stories and plays through the medium of a machine. Sitting up and staring at a type-writer’s keys,
hearing the noise they made when tapped and having to stop to make mechanical
adjustments and corrections -- all this interfered with the process of
creation. I needed to sprawl, with my
eyes fixed on a lined white sheet of paper, whereon my hand magically made
words while I imagined scenes and characters and noted down what they
said. All this seemed to flow from my
mind, down my right arm, through my hand and onto the page.
But this, not being fiction, and a history
rather than a story, is typed on the lap-top I eventually learned to use.
In Hong Kong
I occasionally still wrote a sonnet, mainly with my Mr WH in mind. The
dating of one of the sonnets, not to Mr WH, as being written in March 57,
related to an Army Sports Day, during which I acted as an announcer of results
and forthcoming events. This arose out
of my announcing duties at Radio Hong Kong.
There was also a Regimental Sports Day at Boundary Street, Kowloon,
which I attended as a spectator.
During the Army Sports Day I sat for most
of the time in a hut overlooking the sporting arena, ad-libbing from a
programme of events and reading out results when they were brought to me. It was a fine and sunny spring day, and the
soldiers who were not in civvies, as I was, or in PT gear, were in battledress
uniforms. Assorted officers and NCOs
supervised the day’s proceedings, and at one point a captain, curious to see
who was doing all the announcing, came to my hut, introduced himself and asked
me what unit I was with. I told him I
was at Gun Club. This puzzled him. ‘I’ve not seen you in the Officers’ Mess,’
he said, explaining that although he was from another regiment he visited
fellow officers at Gun Club quite a lot.
Not wishing to embarrass us both by revealing I was not an officer, I
said I was hardly ever in the Officers’ Mess because most evenings and weekends
I was at Radio Hong Kong. And I busied
myself with another announcement.
It wasn’t until 46 years later, on 16
March 1993, that I actually entered the Officers’ Mess and had lunch there. A three-week cruise on the QE2 with Ross
Honeycombe had ended in Hong Kong. During the cruise I entertained passengers
with a couple of lectures, on the Royal Family and ITN – which paid for us
both. On shore I revisited Gun Club by
taxi and having sought permission at the guard-room, now manned by Gurkhas, was
shown around. Much had changed but much
was the same. The RHQ Troop Office had
been demolished, as had the snail-trail row of toilets and both had been replaced
by a modern block lining that side of the parade-ground. The Officers’ Mess was in another new
building and I was invited to have lunch there, among some women as well as
men, at one long table. Most were in
civilian clothes. Gunner Honeycombe was
now acceptable as an equal in an Army context at last.
Back in 1957 there was a funeral and a
wedding in Hong Kong. Both were connected with 15 Medium. The funeral, which I didn’t attend, was of a
Pay Corps Sergeant. I don’t know how he
died. The wedding, in July, was that of Bdr Blackham
in a Kowloon
church. He married an Anglo-Indian girl
and there were more civilians, mainly Asian, than Gun Club gunners there. I wore
one of my tailor-made suits and the silver waistcoat. It was the first wedding I’d attended since
my sister’s three years ago.
There were other social events, apart from
the Troop Smokers (which I don’t remember).
Outings were organised, probably by Sgt Hall, to beaches on the Island and on the mainland. One day about 20 of the Troop, provided with
crates of beer and packed lunches, piled into an ancient coach and, via the Car
Ferry, crossed over to Hong Kong and debussed at Big
Wave Bay
on the eastern side of the Island. Most of the Troop, which included three
sergeants and L/Bdr Manders, the CO’s tubby and motherly batman, wore slacks
and shirts. I see from a photo that
only Sgt Poore and myself wore shorts.
Not much swimming was done as drinking was the squaddies’ aim, and no doubt
there was much singing and foolery on the way back.
For the record, Elvis Presley had already
had nine hits by the time he had his first Number 1 hit, All Shook Up, in
July. Singing the Blues (Guy Mitchell),
Young Love (Tab Hunter), Be Bop a Lula and a Chinese version of Rose, Rose, I love
you rang out in the NAAFI in the first half of that year, and perhaps rowdily
that day in the bus. In the cinemas we
saw or could have seen The Incredible Shrinking Man, Designing Woman, Sweet
Smell of Success, Island in the Sun, The Prince and the Showgirl (starring
Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe) and April Love (also the title of another
Pat Boone song).
L/Bdr King and Sgt Hall were on the
outing to Big Wave Bay,
and so was Gunner Barringer, who accompanied me that summer on two other excursions.
Barringer was a slight, slim, simple lad,
a Northerner, with an honest face and placid demeanour – undemanding and easy
company. I can’t recall his first name,
although it began with an E (Edward, Eddy?).
He wasn’t averse to adventuring and one day we got a bus to Clear Water Bay, to the east of Kowloon.
It sounded like a good place for a swim.
It wasn’t. The tide was out, the sea was flat, and
discouraged by the proximity of a fishing village and refuse on the beach and
in the water, we wandered beyond the right arm of the small bay and began
clambering over stones and boulders seeking a stretch of sand and clear water
where we might swim. There was
none. No other bay opened up and there
was no sand, nothing but boulders and stones below steep slopes. So we made our way back and returned to Gun
Club.
Another excursion, probably my last that
summer, was to Lantau, which was reached by a ferry journey from Hong Kong. I went
there with Barringer.
Lantau was the largest island in the area,
larger and more mountainous than Hong
Kong Island. It was
in fact the sixth largest island in China. It had beaches and interesting features like
an old fort, some Bronze Age remains, a monastery and a huge bronze statue of
Buddha on a hill. The idea was that we
would walk or bus to the monastery and stay the night there, at little if any
cost. A ferry from Hong Kong took us to
Silvermine Bay on Lantau, where we discovered that
the distance to the statue of the Buddha was much greater than I’d
thought. And there were no buses and no one seemed to
speak English. So after a look around
and a swim and a snack we discovered that the last ferry back to Hong Kong had gone.
We wandered disconsolately along by the water’s edge of Silvermine Bay as the sun sank behind the island’s
hills. What were we going to do?
Chance or luck resolved the matter. We saw a group of young short-haired men,
obviously servicemen, on the beach and approached them out of curiosity,
curious to learn if they knew of somewhere we could stay the night. Where were they staying? As it turned out they were staying on the
beach and they invited us to join them.
They were with the RAF in Hong Kong and
had come to Lantau to explore the mine.
What mine? Well, the bay was
called Silvermine
Bay, wasn’t it? And if we looked over there, at the back of
the beach, there was a dark shadow in a sloping cliff-face, the entrance to the
mine. They were going in tomorrow. Would we like to come along? I looked at Barringer and he looked at me
and we said, ‘Yes, all right.’
There were about nine RAF lads camping on
the beach and they shared their evening meal with us and we drank their beer,
all gathered round a small camp-fire on the sand. They gave us some ground-sheets and whatever
spare coverings they had and we hollowed out beds for ourselves in the sand,
with our trousers and shirts folded over our shoes as pillows. We slept to one side of them, not among
them, and it was surprisingly comfortable and strange, with the stars overhead
and the sea lapping the shore, and a few feet away from me on the sand was the
small dark mound that was Barringer.
After a scanty breakfast, the RAF team
kitted themselves in their gear for exploring a mine – boots and hard-hats,
some torches and plenty of rope. We
were wearing shoes and had no hats or torches.
They then roped us all together in some complicated fashion, leaving about
ten feet of loose rope between each of the team, and put us in the middle of
the line, though separated from each other.
It was not until we squeezed past the flimsy barriers, warning signs,
rocks and bushes at the entrance to the mine and entered its cavernous maw that
I realised why we needed to be roped together.
A rounded tunnel about seven feet high,
with a level but debris-strewn floor led into the Stygian gloom. About ten yards from the entrance there was
big black hole in the floor of the tunnel, which had to be bypassed by stepping
around it, along its sloping edge.
There was no going back and no stopping. I saw what the RAF lad in front of me did
and without looking into the seemingly bottomless pit edged my way around the
hole, feeling doomed. There was nothing
to hold onto except the rope and I felt sure my shoes would slip on the packed
earth, angled between the gaping pit and the tunnel wall. But I didn’t fall, nor did anyone
else.
And so we walked on, daylight fading
behind us. And then another black hole
that had to be bypassed appeared in the floor.
Bats began flicking by us. They
were little bats, and someone called out, ‘Just keep walking! They won’t touch you!’ And amazingly they didn’t, flipping past
within inches of my face.
We didn’t walk very far into the mine, perhaps
about 100 yards or so, reaching a wider area where the tunnel was blocked and
light filtered down on us from above.
Here we regrouped, and then we returned the way we had come, once more
treading very carefully around the holes in the floor, keeping to the left, as
we had on the way in.
I didn’t know I was fatalistic, but I did
now. If I was going to fall into the
pit I was prepared to fall. If I
wasn’t, I would carry on. And if I
fell, someone would save me. As
Shakespeare said, ‘The readiness is all.’
Or as the Bible says, ‘So be it – Amen.’
But I’m sure Barringer and I celebrated
our adventure and our deliverance with a couple of beers and returned to Gun
Club feeling as if we had just climbed Everest. I did anyway.
Silvermine Bay is now called Mui Wo and the mine
has been sealed off. Lantau is now a
tourists’ play-ground, with a Disneyland, a cable car and an International Airport
and housing estates, and the little bats have found some other home.
Nearly 50 years after the Lantau
adventure, on 22 September 2005, when I read the ITN News once again, with Mary
Nightingale, on the 50th anniversary of ITV, Barringer rang ITN from
Wigan to say Hello. It wasn’t a good time to chat and the
conversation was disjointed and brief.
I didn’t even take down his phone number, or think to ask him what he
recalled about our time in Hong Kong and Silvermine Bay.
Before I left Hong
Kong, the last of my three National Service aims was
fulfilled. I had learned to type and
had travelled to the other side of the world.
Now I learned to drive.
In July I went to the MT Office and saw
Sgt Poore. He detailed a corporal in
the Royal Signals to give me driving lessons in his spare time during the day. As it would never be necessary for me to
drive a 5-ton truck, I learned how to drive a jeep.
This wasn’t that difficult as the gears
were fairly easy to handle and the dash-board indicators easy to read. The only problem was that the jeep was made
for smaller persons. The wheel was
quite wide and when I used both hands to turn it, it became wedged between my
upraised knees. If I spread my knees
the gear-stick was obscured. But as the
driving lessons were held in the wide spaces of the Gun and Vehicle Parks,
nothing was likely to be damaged and no civilians hurt or alarmed, although
latterly the corporal got me to drive out the rear gate of Gun Club, into
Gascoigne Road and circle Gun Club Hill.
Lt Thomas had appointed himself as the
judge of my driving test, and when the day dawned and he emerged from the MT
Office to find me and a jeep outside, he said I could drive him home. He was a married man and lived in a flat in
north Kowloon. Accompanied by the corporal, who was
compressed into a seat at the back, and with Lt Thomas beside me, I ventured
out along Austin Road
and then right into Nathan Road,
where the traffic was always quite heavy.
Stopping and starting at lights caused me my most anxious moments, but
within 15 minutes I pulled up outside the house where Lt Thomas lived. He climbed out and said, ‘Well, Honeycombe,
as you didn’t manage to kill me on the way here, I reckon you’ve passed. Well done.’
Then the corporal got in the passenger seat and I drove him safely back
to Gun Club.
And
that was how, on 17 August, I obtained a driving licence qualifying me to drive
Group A vehicles.
Later on I swapped the licence for a
civilian one and although I renewed it periodically for 30 years, just in case,
I have never owned a car, nor driven one -- nor had cause to drive a jeep
again. By the time I was able to afford
a car I had become used to getting about by public transport. Because of the war, as a family we had had
no car in Karachi, and none later on in Edinburgh. In Oxford
I got about by bicycle and by hitch-hiking.
Besides, I had a zero interest in machines or anything mechanical. Ultimately I realised that the cost and the
overall annual upkeep of a car exceeded the cost of trains and public
transport, of taxis and mini-cabs. It
was less costly, more convenient and sensible for a single city-dweller like me
not to have one.
Three days after the driving test, on 20 August,
I said goodbye, with slight unexpected feelings of sadness, to the RHQ Troop
Office, my work-place and home, and to Gun Club, which would soon be taken over
by the Gurkhas and is now occupied by the People’s Liberation Army of
China. I had had a generally happy and
unhassled time in Hong Kong, with few duties
to perform and few responsibilities.
I’d been regularly and well fed, and given money weekly and quite
comfortably housed. I’d had time to
pursue whatever interested me and whatever I enjoyed, and there was always the
enlivening, constant awareness of being in an oriental city on the other side
of the world. And I had saved a useful
sum of money through my employment at Radio Hong Kong.
Transported from Gun Club across Kowloon with hundreds of other National Servicemen
returning to England,
I embarked with them on a troopship, HMT Empire Fowey, for the voyage
home. The Empire Fowey, originally a
German ship, which was launched in Hamburg in
1936 and became a P&O ship after WW2, would be sold, ironically, to Pakistan in 1960 and eventually torn apart and scrapped
in my natal home-town, Karachi.
Laden with a cheap but very large suitcase
stuffed with presents and souvenirs and all the clothes I had bought, I
struggled on board with hundreds of others, and found the cabin I’d been
allocated and the Ship’s Office where, as a clerk, I was once again to be
employed during the voyage. I also
sought out the Entertainments Officer, and emboldened by my year with Radio
Hong Kong got him to agree to me presenting the record requests -- the most
popular on the voyage, inevitably, being
Look Homeward, Angel (Johnny Ray) and
Pat Boone’s I’ll be Home.’ At the end of my last broadcast, in answer to
some letter-writer wanting to know who I was, I signed off with my number, rank
and name.
The only shipboard event I recall was a classier
form of a Troop Smoker, in which I foolishly volunteered to sing that other Pat
Boone hit, ‘Thee I Love,’ from the film, Friendly Persuasion. This was a mistake, as I didn’t sing it very
well and was daunted by senior officers and their wives visibly sitting in
judgement on me. Besides, I’d had a
nasty boil lanced on my left arm the day before and, apart from feeling off
colour (as well as being off-key), was sporting an embarrassingly untidy
bandage around the afflicted arm.
The voyage was more leisurely than that of
the Asturias and took 31
days, as this time we spent a couple of days in port, at Singapore, Colombo
and Aden. And this time I went ashore at the last two.
Squaddies’ trips ashore usually involved
drink, sex and tattoos and in that order.
At Colombo
I persuaded L/Bdr Norman King, Gunner Ron Cox, a sun-tanned, sparky little
chap, and another gunner, to do something different, to go with me by train a
short distance down the coast, to Mount
Lavinia. I must have read somewhere that this was
where William Holden met the only white female in the film of The Bridge on the
River Kwai, which had been made in Ceylon
and would be released in October that year, two months after we arrived back in
England. He and a nurse went for a walk on that very
same beach at Mount
Lavinia.
It was a scenic beach, with white sand and
a grove of tall, feathery palm-trees and at the other end, on a low headland,
the Mount Lavinia Hotel, once the residence of a Governor-General. We ambled along the beach in our OG and
trousered uniforms, berets and belts, and having looked inside a small temple
sat in basket chairs on the lawn outside the hotel and ordered some beers. A diversion was provided by a young native
snake-charmer in a shirt and colourful sarong.
He had a cobra in a basket, and
after he had piped it out of the basket, he took hold of it and proceeded to
play with it, with its flickering tongue very close to his face. He then invited us to handle the cobra and
trustingly we did, holding the neck with one hand and the tail with the other,
while the rest of the snake’s body writhed on our shoulders behind our heads.
Other creatures occupied our time ashore at
Aden. The four of us were led by Norman King in
search of a donkey that was alleged to perform eye-popping and unimaginable
acts with a woman. Or perhaps it was the
other way around. Norman had apparently seen such a performance
before. This was really not something I
wanted to see, but curiosity and the ‘dare’ involved made the rest of us sheepishly
follow him down some insalubrious alleys.
He spoke, with gestures, to men in doorways. But it seemed that the donkey, or the woman,
was having a day off. Later, after a
beer or two, we were accosted on the way back to the quay by a native man with
a string of camels. The star of his
troop was a young female camel, which didn’t do any turns or tricks but obliged
by taking each of us in turn for a ride, for which we all paid. The camel’s owner then offered to sell her
to me for ten dollars. The vision of
riding on a camel back to the ship or down Princes Street in Edinburgh was enticing. But where would I stow her on the ship? I had to refuse.
The ship’s next stop, after a leisurely
progress through the stifling weather and blue waters of the Red Sea, was Suez, where we waited to join the queue proceeding up the
Suez Canal to Port Said. The Empire Fowey then crept up the calm
waters of the Canal, avoiding the superstructures of wrecked cargo-ships, as
many as 40, that had been blown up by Nasser
to block the way. After the Suez Crisis was resolved the wrecks
had either been cleared away or dragged aside.
Gun emplacements and wrecked vehicles were still to be seen on the banks
of the Canal and some parts of Port
Said were damaged.
But the bum-boats were back in business.
At some point during the voyage, when
looking for a quiet nook to sunbathe and boost my tan before the ship entered
cooler climes, I was mildly surprised to find Norman King and Ron Cox in a
sheltered nook, perched on a life-raft, in uniform -- and Ron was lying on his
back with his head in Norman’s
lap. They weren’t startled by my
appearance, and were seemingly quite at ease with each other and unembarrassed
by my intrusion.
After Port Said the Asturias moved purposefully
across the Mediterranean, homeward-bound, and we began, reluctantly, to think
ahead, to think about the looming reality of British cities, British weather,
about our familes and home, which we had hardly ever done during our
untrammelled, very different and foreign existence in Hong Kong.
We docked in Southampton,
disembarking on Wednesday, 18 September 1957, after which we entrained for
Waterloo Station and Woolwich.
Goodbyes were said as those of us whose
National Service had come to an end were split up and disappeared, mainly to Woolwich,
before individually taking trains all over the country to the English, Welsh
and Scottish cities and towns that were our homes. I’m sure we said to some that we would keep
in touch. But we hardly ever did, once
we were restored to our families and our schoolday friends.
Although Danny Penman hadn’t returned on
the Empire Fowey, having signed on for another year, I would see him thereafter
in Scotland
about once a year. Sometimes he came over to Edinburgh
or I went over to Fife. He married and was badly injured in a mining
accident, when he was caught between two trucks underground and his pelvis
crushed. He recovered, but was confined to working on
the surface of one of the pits. As time
passed I saw him less and less – he never wrote. But his address lingered on in my pocket
diaries until 1980, and his phone number for another two years.
It was on 23 September 1957, a Sunday,
when I returned to Edinburgh
at the conclusion of my two years of National Service.
Three days later I reported, as ordered,
to 445 LAA Regiment RA/TA in Glasgow
to enlist, as all National Servicemen had to do, in the Territorial Army. But it wasn’t until 21 October
that I was officially posted to 445 LAA Regt RA/TA. I never in fact did any TA training and was
discharged from the Army nearly two years later, on 10 August 1959, as
‘medically unfit for further service.’
But more about that later.
My period of Terminal Leave began on my 21st
birthday, Friday, 27 September, and officially lasted until 20 October, by
which time I was in Oxford. Nothing special was made of my birthday,
which would have been spent at my sister’s place in Broomhall.
While I was in Hong Kong Billy Elder had
died, on 3 April 1956. He left his
small mortgaged house in Prestwick, and all it
contained, to Aunt Donny. She and my
father had spent the whole of that July and August in the house before she sold
it in September. All the brass, silver,
ivory and carved wood gifts that he had sent to his mother from India during
the years 1920 to 1928, AD gave to her brother, to be passed on to me and
Marion in due course. He assured her he
would never part with or sell any of these exotic Indian treasures. But after his death my unsentimental mother
pawned or sold them to raise some cash.
Only a few minor items ever reached me when she died.
At the end of September 1957, after a
three-month trip by sea to Canada,
AD travelled to Edinburgh
to see me, my mother, Marion and Jim Campbell and their four-month old baby
daughter. I doubt that she visited my
mother’s accommodation – we would have met in Princes Street for lunch or tea -- and
consequently she would never see that virtually all the Indian souvenirs had
disappeared.
When I returned to Edinburgh,
several documents sent from Oxford by University College awaited me. They required careful reading as they laid
down the basic requirements of my new life as an undergraduate. One was a copy of a circular sent by the
college dean, AG (Tony) Guest, to all those students who were coming to University College to begin their further
education. It informed me that rooms in
the college had been assigned to me and that I should turn up on Thursday, 10
October.
I was also instructed to bring with me –
‘3 Prs of Sheets, 4 Pillow cases, 4 Towels, 3 Dusters, 4 Glass-cloths.’ I was told, ‘You will also require some
crockery for making tea in your own rooms, as well as a kettle,’ and I was informed
that ‘each bed is provided with 3 upper blankets, but you may wish to bring a
rug or an eiderdown.’ Finally, I was
advised that ‘all clothes, linen, etc, should be marked with your own name.’ This task was dealt with by my mother, who
spent several days sewing tabs labelled ‘RG Honeycombe’ onto all the aforesaid items
of clothing and linen. Not wishing to
be lumbered with blankets and an eiderdown on my train journey, not to mention
crockery and a kettle, I didn’t add these items to my luggage. If necessary they could be bought in Oxford.
Another printed document outlined college
fees and expenses. These were
calculated to amount to about £375 a year.
Certain fees were payable when I arrived – an Admission Fee (£20), a
Matriculation Fee (£6) and Caution Money (£20), which was returnable when I
took my degree. College bills, known as
Battells and payable at the end of each term, included Board and Lodging
(£50-15-0) and Tuition Fees (£21).
Heating, lighting and laundry charges amounted to about £5 a term, and
students were expected to tip their college servants, known as scouts, ten
shillings at the end of every term. The
basic cost of living in college was about £100 a term, most of which I’d be able
to pay from the wages I’d received from Radio Hong Kong and saved. But on top of that there were all the
incidental costs and living expenses accumulated through eating out and
drinking, going to the cinema and theatre, and shopping for all the necessities
of daily life. It was not going to be
easy financially, but fortunately I didn’t have extravagant tastes and disliked
owing money and being in debt.
Ahead of me now were three years of study
at University College,
Oxford, in
another new world that was in some ways even more daunting than National
Service. Those three years became four,
and a completely different set of events was set in motion as a result.
On the morning of Thursday, 10 October
1957, my mother once again said goodbye to me at Waverley Station, and once
again I faced the Great Unknown.
9. OXFORD and PINEWOOD,
1957-1959
University
College had a double frontage on the
High Street in Oxford,
which had been extended as properties on either side of it were bought and
turned into college accommodation.
There was a legend that the college had been founded by King
Alfred. But the real founder was a
theologian, William of Durham, who when he died in Rouen
in 1249 left a large sum of money to support scholars studying theology in Oxford. They were housed in what was at first called
the Little Hall of the University and then, after more property was acquired,
the Great Hall of the University. The medieval buildings that had formed the
early college were torn down in the 17th century, and replaced by
the Main Quad and the Radcliffe Quad, dating respectively from 1676 and
1719. The Library dates from 1861. These were the buildings I saw when I arrived
in October 1957, and although there have been changes and additions they are
much the same today.
Laden with my luggage, which included the
requested sheets, pillow-cases and towels, I mounted the steps leading from the
High Street pavement up to the arched entrance under the Main Quad’s tower, as
thousands of undergraduates had done before me, and checked in at the Porter’s
Lodge. There I was given the number of
the staircase and the rooms I would be sharing with another undergraduate in my
first year. The Head Porter, Douglas, had been a
sergeant-major in the Royal Artillery (he wore the RA zig-zag tie, and glasses)
and he still possessed the vocabulary and authoritative persona of his previous
military incarnation. Those of us who
had done National Service tended to be favoured by him. The rest were either ‘fucking schoolboys’ --
or ‘fucking Colonials’ if they were Rhodes Scholars.
I made my way from the Main Quad to the
Radcliffe Quad and found that the entrance to 11.1 was to the right of the
arched space under the Radcliffe tower and up some stairs. This led me to a large sitting-room
overlooking the lawn of the Radcliffe Quad and the Master’s Building and here I
found that the other undergraduate with whom I was sharing had already made himself
at home and had taken the single bedroom on the floor above. He informed me that my bedroom was at the
bottom of a different staircase, numbered 10, which was opposite 11.1 and was
entered from the other side of the arched space under the tower.
His
name was Tim Gee, a tall, sallow-faced historian with eyes and mouth
permanently shaping a smile that seemed to indicate he had a secret. From the start I didn’t take to him and as a
result had little to do with him and hardly ever used our sitting-room,
visiting instead the rooms of the chums I acquired at Univ, as well as the JCR
(Junior Common Room). The College Library was a quiet haven in which
to read and to write my essays. As it was, I was frequently not in the college,
except for meals, going out to drink beer at assorted pubs, and visiting
cinemas or theatres every week, and from my second term onwards being immersed
in plays and play rehearsals. I became
involved with 15 college and university productions while I was at Oxford, as well as two
tours and two productions staged on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The Michaelmas or Winter Term began
officially a few days later, on Sunday, 13 October.
It was now a matter of getting used to
college routines, to having breakfast, lunch and dinner in the lofty,
wood-panelled dining-hall, to attending tutorials and lectures, of getting used
to the company of about 480 other young men and to being looked after by a
scout, who made your bed, washed up, cleaned and tidied, and generally
performed the duties of a housemaid.
Scouts usually had the rooms of the occupants of one particular staircase
in their charge. My scout was a small
middle-aged man, with glasses, called John.
I saw very little of him as I was seldom in my rooms except at
night. At the end of term I dutifully
left a ten-shilling note in an envelope for him marked ‘John’ in my
ground-floor bedroom, which had a single bed, a cupboard and a wash-basin set
under a window looking onto the Radcliffe Quad. A half-length net curtain hid my ablutions
from those who passed by the window.
As a Commoner I donned a short black
sleeveless gown, the length of a jacket, when eating in hall, when attending
lectures and seeing my tutor or anyone official. Scholars had long black gowns that enviably
billowed behind them as they sped here and there. My English tutor was Peter Bayley, who had
his own set of rooms overlooking the Fellows’ Garden. He was easily satisfied by my once-a-week
two-page essays, which I based, when possible, on essays I had written at the
Academy and had kept, in case they might be useful later on, as were any notes
I’d made -- and they were. Sometimes I
just copied passages and extracts of what I’d written at school. Tutorials, lasting an hour, were agreeable,
as Peter Bayley, who was genial, rather lazy and wore glasses, was happy to do
most of the talking while comforting himself by eating chocolates. He had been at Univ as a student during WW2,
becoming a Fellow at the College in 1947 and not marrying until 1963.
Five of us freshmen began working towards
an English degree that year. One was a small,
fair-haired scholar, McLoughlin, with whom we four Commoners had little
contact. I didn’t like him. The other three were Sid Bradley, Mike
Fletcher and Pete Hudson. Eventually I
would get to know, by name at least, the other 71 freshmen, although only three
or four would ever become more than an acquaintance. I also got to know some of those who were a
year or so ahead of us. One of them was
AG (Alan) McGregor, who had been at the Academy (where I didn’t really know him
– although he was Sgt Fester in Jake) and was studying classics. He was at Univ before me as he had been
excused from doing National Service on medical grounds. His
rooms were in Kybald House, a small residential building beside the Library,
where those of us freshers reading English had Latin tutorials for a time from
GL (George) Cawkwell, a loud and large former Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand.
Alan McGregor’s scout was a doughty
female, who dubbed me “Sobersides”, because, I presume, I looked serious and
hardly smiled – not when in her company anyway.
In a semi-sunken garden outside Kybald
House lived two tortoises, whose shells were occasionally painted by
celebratory college sporting hearties, and there was a college cat, a sullen and
antisocial black cat called Satan. But
more about him later.
Another college institution that used to
receive the attentions of bibulous students was a statue of the poet Shelley,
who had been expelled from Univ in 1811 after writing a pamphlet about The
Necessity of Atheism. In June 1822 he and his companions were
drowned when his sailing-boat foundered off the coast of Italy. His body when found was bloated and rotting,
his face and arms eaten by sea creatures.
It was burnt on a barren beach.
The marble statue at Univ portrayed him, naked, as a beautiful youth,
his body limply lying as if newly washed up on the shore. This figure, supported on a large and ornate
bronze base, was entombed in a special enclosure opposite the foot of staircase
3. Periodically the statue’s genitals
were painted by sportive hearties, as was the body, and once the sunken area of
the enclosure was imaginatively flooded with water. Pranks were a feature of college life and
usually followed a sporting triumph in rowing, rugby or cricket.
Another feature of college life was the
bicycle. Nearly everyone had a bike for
getting about Oxford, although generally we walked
everywhere -- down to the River Thames, which was here called the Isis, around the Meadows, to other colleges, to pubs and
cinemas. Rickety old bikes were bought for a few pounds
from departed or departing undergraduates, and if someone borrowed yours, you
borrowed someone else’s.
All 76 of 1957’s freshmen were
photographed in the Main Quad outside the SCR (Senior Common Room) at the
beginning of the Michaelmas Term. We
all wore ties and most wore sporty jackets and sleeveless cardigans like me, my
jacket being a tweedy green, and my shirt dark green, as was my tie. My hair was still thick enough to be brushed
sideways without looking absurd. Very
few of us wore a suit, and even fewer in the photo bothered to smile. I expect most of us were still suffering
from the shock of the new.
Another photo, taken on 22 October 1957,
shows a group of us freshmen on our way to the obligatory Matriculation
Ceremony to be registered as members of the University. If we didn’t matriculate we couldn’t
graduate. Walking in a ragged
crocodile, wearing subfusc clothing (dark suits, white shirt and white
bow-ties) and led by Univ’s classics don, Freddie Wells, we were heading for
the Sheldonian Theatre, a large round building, designed by Wren, which was
used for various university ceremonies as well as lectures and recitals. I was near the front and beside me was
Neville Thomas, who was studying law.
Tim Gee can be glimpsed further back.
I wasn’t the tallest of the freshmen, two were taller. Of the other freshers reading English there
is no sign. I suspect we were divided
up into two groups.
Although I had been to a public school,
albeit a Scottish one, I tended, after my two years of associating with
working-class boys, to gravitate towards those Commoners who had been to
grammar schools. I felt awkward in the
company of the very English, well-spoken boys who had been at top English
public schools, like Eton and Harrow, who came
from worlds of wealth and privilege that were quite unknown to me, decent chaps
though they were. I also tended to
associate with Caucasian types, and not with any students who were noticeably
foreign, Jewish or coloured.
It was inevitable that we four freshmen
who were reading English should associate with each other more than with the
other undergraduates, although there was also a loose bond with those in the
second and third years who were also studying English. Those with whom we shared our rooms in
college didn’t necessarily become friends, although Pete Hudson was closely
attended by his room-mate, a geographer, Keith Jones. Peter Wilson, with whom Sid Bradley roomed
at the top of staircase 7, was never much in evidence – he played rugby and Sid
rowed – and Mike Fletcher’s room-mate was hardly ever seen with him.
What determined whom you associated with
the most, whom you sat with in hall, whom you went to lectures with and drank
with and went to the cinema with, were shared subjects of study, like English,
shared sporty and arty interests and activities, shared regional origins and
the kind of school you had attended.
Another factor that influenced who your
companions were was National Service.
Those who had done their two years were older in age and experience than
the 18-year-olds who had come to Oxford
straight from school. If at the age of
19 I had come to Oxford in October 1955, I would have been more disadvantaged
than I was aged 21, and a completely different set of circumstance and people
would have influenced my life at Oxford and my entire future – as happened in
1958, when my time at Oxford was disrupted and I missed a year.
It was also inevitable that I saw more of
Sid Bradley than anyone else, as Peter Bayley had paired us together for his
tutorials. We were also paired together
for Anglo-Saxon tutorials, which were held in the flat of a youngish, stocky
and smiley don, OD (Osgar) Macrae-Gibson, who was attached as a doctoral
student to Oriel College. A Scot, who was sometimes to be seen in a
kilt, he had been an officer in the Royal Navy for 10 years and gained a First
in English at Oxford
in 1955. He submitted a DPhil thesis in
1965.
Learning to read Anglo-Saxon prose and
poetry was involving and helpful to me as a writer, and I was much more in
sympathy with the verses, ideals, beliefs and customs of the eighth century
than those of the 18th century.
I translated Beowulf and other poems and used what I’d read of
Anglo-Saxon verses and chronicles in my second published novel, Dragon under
the Hill – the title came from a piece of runic verse. Later on I read all the Icelandic sagas in
translation – some translated by Magnus Magnusson -- and visited Iceland three
times and Greenland twice.
Once when Macrae-Gibson had a cold he
tutored us sitting up in his bed. He
was a Freemason and persuaded Sid to join the fraternity. Sid then co-opted me. I was duly initiated, but I found the
play-acting of the ceremonies to be faintly absurd and the superficial joviality
of the Freemasons and their lavish dinners not to my liking. I soon opted out. Sid stayed.
He tended to have what I thought was an excessive regard for those of
higher social and academic standings than himself, and a smarmy craving to be socially
acceptable and admired. He was humourous,
well-mannered and very polite, especially when dealing with older people, with
older women, and with those who might in some way benefit his chosen (though
unknown to me then) academic career.
He and I had little in common except that
we were exactly the same height, liked the same music and were reading English.
He also wrote stories and had written a
play, and was good at drawing comical cartoon figures. His
hand-writing was very small, neat and not cursive, the letters tight and curly. At Oxford
he learned to play the guitar and used to sing doleful or bawdy ditties in a high
and mournful voice with little expression or animation. ‘On Springfield Mountain’
was a favourite, and I harmonised with him on that one, as I did with some
others, like the bawdy ‘The Lusty Young Smith.’
He came from a working-class
family in Warwickshire, from Shipston, and looked like an Anglo-Saxon ploughman,
with his muscular, top-heavy frame and fairish hair. He plodded along with his head down, as if contemplating
the ground, and our Latin tutor told me years later that as a student Sid was
‘a plodder’. Although fresh-faced, his
features were quite haggard, even gaunt.
He had a scar on his upper lip and such small blue eyes it was difficult
to read what he felt. He’d been schooled, like Shakespeare, at the
grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, where
he became Head Prefect and Captain of Rowing.
He was better acquainted with girls than me, having dallied with
Warwickshire wenches, some of whom he inherited from his older brother. His National Service was spent in England in the RAF, when he acquired a
girl-friend, Shirley, who coincidentally came from Bournemouth. Having been born on 27 March 1936 he was
exactly six months older than me, Aries to my Libra. It was an intense and rocky relationship,
but somehow endured, off and on, for 60 years.
The Michaelmas Term of 1957 was largely spent
by us freshmen in becoming accustomed to college and university life. Our days were marked by meal-times, times
for attending lectures and tutorials, times for meeting friends for a coffee in
the JCR, in the Beer Cellar, or in your rooms and, depending on your interests,
times for sports practices and rehearsals for plays. And the passing of time was marked every day
by the bells of Merton
College sonorously
sounding every quarter. Merton was to
the rear of Univ and the slow tolling of its bells in the great tower of the
college chapel could be heard in Univ wherever you were.
In the club-like JCR, coffee and tea were
served, and there were well-worn leather chairs in which to sit and smoke and
chat, or read the daily papers. Large
leather-bound and ancient photo albums of college rowing Eights, rugby XVs and
cricket XIs could be perused, and framed photos of winning teams adorned the
walls, as well as a notice-board and an oar or pairs of oars from winning
Eights. Silver cups and trophies were
also on display. The college’s Beer
Cellar, which was under the dining-hall, had a bar, two pool tables and a darts
board. It was much patronised by hearty
sportsmen. I was never a heavy drinker,
having been put off from being so by my father’s example and my own excesses
with rum and Coke in Hong Kong. Sid had likewise been deterred from excesses
of drink because of his father’s fondness for it.
In addition to the JCR, the lamp-lit
formal dinner in hall every night was another place for convivial male conversations
once the tradition of a spoken Grace had been delivered. Univ had the longest Grace in the
university. It was delivered
alternately by the Master, or a Senior Fellow, and a Scholar -- some 23 lines
that began ‘Benedictus sit Deus in bonis suis.’ The three rows of long tables, at which we
sat on long benches on either side of the tables, were overlooked by oil
paintings of previous Masters and distinguished clerics, academics and
politicians who had graduated at Univ.
The current Master was Arthur Goodhart, a Professor of Jurisprudence and
Fellow since 1931, who was elected as Master in 1951. He came from a very wealthy family and was
the first American and the first Jew to be elected as Head of an Oxford or Cambridge
college.
A drinking custom in hall that had been
common to many colleges for over a hundred years had become an infrequent
occurrence by 1957. Known as ‘sconcing’
it was visited on undergraduates who were late arriving in hall or were
inappropriately dressed or discussed their work or the portraits on the walls
or mentioned a lady’s name. Another
reason for sconcing disappeared a year after I arrived when the college Grace
had no longer to be recited from memory.
The person to be sconced was handed a tankard containing two and a half
pints of beer. He could either pay for
it or pass it around his neighbours at the table, or drain the tankard’s
contents in 25 seconds while the butler timed him holding a stopwatch. If he succeeded, the sconcer had to pay for
the beer. In the early 1950s Bob Hawke,
a Rhodes Scholar and future Prime Minister of Australia, downed a sconce in a
record 11 seconds.
Although I made an effort to attend some
lectures at the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, as I did at the start of
every term thereafter, except in my last year, I soon abandoned the practice
and pretence of finding them at all interesting, as reading books and making
notes was, I thought, more useful and productive. Lectures seemed to me to be largely a waste
of time. The lecturers themselves might
be informative and entertaining, and if they were dons with reputations, like
Nevill Coghill and Lord David Cecil, they were worth a visit or two. But the atmosphere in lecture halls, and
lecturers’ voices, tended to be soporific, although the presence of more
studious and attentive female undergraduates was enlivening and might lead,
through a regular attendance at lectures, to conversations, to coffee mornings,
and eventually to invitations to tea at a women’s college. In this way, Bradley, Fletcher, Hudson and I
all became acquainted with some girls from Lady Margaret Hall, known as LMH, to
the exclusion of girls from other women’s colleges, like Somerville, St Hilda’s
and St Hugh’s.
Girls were still something of a mystery to
most of us who’d been immured with other young men at boarding-schools and
during National Service, and the comfortable familiarity of male companionship
was inevitably sustained at Oxford and even intensified, as there were less
restraints at Oxford, and everywhere a plenitude of the best of British youth,
and persons whose company might be sought and enjoyed every day. Oxford
was a hothouse, wherein friendships, relationships, romantic and physical
liaisons of every kind might flourish.
And the brevity of each term – all three of the Oxford terms each lasted just eight weeks (we
were only there for half a year) meant that everything was more highly charged,
compressed by time and enhanced by opportunity.
There was a Freshers’ Night in the Beer
Cellar, at which second and third year undergraduates made themselves known to
us and rated our capacity, among other qualities, for downing pints of
beer. There was also a Freshers’ Fair
in the town, at which all the clubs and societies advertised their activities
and tried to get us to join their particular set-ups. A few
keen recruiters visited our rooms attempting to add us to their
memberships. I had no interest in
political, religious, sporting or even literary societies, so after taking
their leaflets did nothing more.
However, the Oxford
University Dramatic Society (OUDS) and the Experimental Theatre Club (ETC) were
obviously worth investigating – as was the college drama society, Univ
Players. This had been created by my
tutor, Peter Bayley, during the war, although its first major production,
Measure for Measure, wasn’t staged until May 1946.
An open-air OUDS production of Henry V
had been presented in Magdalen
College in the summer of
1957 and was still being talked about.
It had been directed by Peter Dews, a BBC TV drama director, with a freshman,
Patrick Garland, playing Henry V. Kenneth Tynan wrote about this production in
the Observer. He said, ‘Mincing and
fluting, those trademarks of recent OUDS productions, have been rigorously
banished … With the thickening dusk, warmed by Mr Dews’s liberal use of torches
and braziers, the great war-poem comes across in full and glowing comradeship …
Harry himself, Patrick Garland, conquered lack of inches and facial
unimpressiveness by sheer driving intelligence.’ Garland was in due course elected as
President of OUDS and went on to play leads in several OUDS productions, his
swan song being the title role in Coriolanus in March 1959 – a production I would
never see due to untoward circumstances quite beyond my control.
Every year OUDS staged a major production
as well as a minor one. In 1957/58 the
President was Vernon Dobtcheff, who had played Faustus in March 1957 and took
the lead in King Lear in February 1958.
I auditioned for this towards the end of the Michaelmas Term. Never having formally auditioned before, I
found the process and the unsmiling persons who sat in judgement on me
daunting. Despite my Brutus, Malvolio
and Bassanio (not to mention my Goneril) they were not impressed and I was
miserably unsuccessful. As a freshman I
was completely unknown to them, and hadn’t proved myself, or been seen, in any
college productions. Nor was I part of
an acting clique. Besides, being taller
than Dobtcheff, who affected a Wildean style and looked like an aristocratic
gryphon, I was probably too tall to share the stage with him, although he was a
six-footer. Garland,
who played Edmund in this Lear, and Ken Loach, who was a slight and skinny Kent,
were both several inches shorter than Dobtcheff. Lear was directed by a Harvard graduate and
performed on a bare stage, uncut, in the Playhouse. I went
to see it, expecting much, and was much disillusioned and disappointed. It
lasted for an interminable four and a half hours.
Patrick Garland became in time the
artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre (twice) and directed 21
plays there. Dobtcheff went on to
appear as a character actor playing minor parts in over 300 films and
television plays. Ken Loach became a famed
television and film director, and after Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home he
directed a television play for the BBC that I wrote with Neville Smith about
Everton Football Club, The Golden Vision.
It was well reviewed, though some critics were confused by its content,
mixing scenes at the Club with scenes involving Everton fans played by
actors. It would now be called a
docu-drama.
About the same time as the OUDS audition
for Lear I was approached by the committee of Univ Players and asked if I would
take part in next term’s college production of Othello – as Othello. It was not a part I fancied, as the high
tragedy of the play was, I felt, quite beyond my capabilities and those of an
amateur, student company. Besides, I
didn’t have the physiognomy of a Moor or an Arab and would have to black up,
with not very convincing results. Worst
of all, it was to be a modern dress production, without the protective disguise
of period costumes, whether Moorish, Elizabethan or Venetian. But as an Oxford debut it was better to play a lead than
nothing at all.
Half way through the Michaelmas Term I
was sent a bill, called Half Term Battels, for £92-7-0. Although this had been foretold in the
printed notification of College and University Fees and Expenses sent to me in
September, it was something of a shock.
I hadn’t read the hand-out properly.
It had said, ‘The following charges must be paid by half-term,’ and it
added, ‘A statement of all remaining charges will be sent out during the
vacation and must be paid by the beginning of next term.’ There was also a payment of three guineas to
the JCR and two shillings for what was described as ‘Luggage, Moves.’ The Domestic Bursar received my cheque on 7
November.
My first term at Oxford ended on Saturday, 7 December. The night before this there was a gathering
of new chums, including Bradley, Fletcher, McGregor and a few others in the
sitting-room of 11.1 – Tim Gee must have been away. As I
was returning to Scotland
on an early train the following morning, I retired about 10.30 or so to my
bedroom at the bottom of staircase 10 and went to bed. Although I’d already said goodbye, the
others trooped in noisily later on, to say goodbye again. They did so one by one, the last one being
Sid Bradley, who solemnly shook my hand.
Sid wrote to me in Edinburgh, meaningfully but obliquely, and I replied
at lesser length and wrote two sonnets and read, at his suggestion, Cat on a
Hot in Roof by Tennessee Williams. I
returned to Oxford two days before the start of the Hilary Term and met up with
Sid, who had also come up early, in his rooms at the top of staircase 7, where
he was temporarily on his own, as Peter Wilson, like most of the college,
hadn’t yet made an appearance. He
suggested we go for a walk by the river, although it was cold, dark and rainy,
and we did so, sharing a single black umbrella and passing it from one to the
other. Back in his sitting-room, which
was dimly lit by two small table lamps with red shades, we sat in low armchairs
on either side of a two-bar electric fire, drank instant coffee, said very
little, and listened to LPs he played on his gramophone, Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’
Piano Concerto and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Whenever I hear the latter I remember that
night.
The Hilary or Spring Term began officially
on Sunday, 19 January 1958, and in addition to weekly tutorials in English,
Anglo-Saxon and Latin, I was soon rehearsing Othello at weekends and on some
evenings.
Playing Othello was beyond me, as I was
too young, and had little understanding of the adult matters of the play, never
having been an irrational, possessive or jealous person, nor prone to fits and
murderous moods. How well I pretended
to be such a person I do not know. I
had some wonderful speeches and lines to say, and this helped, but my
performance wasn’t helped by the production being in modern dress and by my
having to black up my face and hands. I
just felt odd. Peter Wells as Iago was
more convincing as an army officer – he was a Captain and my ADC – but Timothy
Gee was not that convincing as a Lt Colonel and my Second-in-Command. Lodovico and Gratiano were Cabinet Ministers,
Brabantio a Lord and the Doge a Duke.
The Duke was played by Robin Butler, who would one day become Lord
Butler, Master of Univ. But more about
him later.
A second year scholar, Bill Tydeman,
directed the play – produced it as we said then – and did his best to hold the
hotch-potch together. The set was a
plain one of rostra, pillars and curtains, and to represent a modern sunny Cyprus, a
couple of bathing beauties provided the background in an outdoor scene. This excited the attention of the university
newspaper, Cherwell, which gave us three paragraphs topped by a photo of an
attractive girl from St Clare’s and the headline ‘Bikini Beauty for
Othello.’ Nothing, however, could
convince the cast and the audience that we were anywhere other than in a cold
bleak hall in a dreary north-eastern suburb of Oxford, reached by a Number 8 bus.
We didn’t move into the Marston Hall until
the end of the Third Week of the Hilary Term, when it was bitterly cold. We performed there at 8.15 for five nights
in the Fourth Week, from Tuesday, 11 February to the Saturday, when there was
also a Matinee at 4.30 pm, which was seen by very few. There were never many people in the audience. But they didn’t have to pay much (3/6) for
the privilege of witnessing my Oxford
debut. Seeing them from the stage, scattered
here and there and stolidly wearing coats, scarves, caps and hats, didn’t help
in creating an illusion of sunny Cyprus, which, as it happened, I
would visit many times in future years, in connection with my fifth book, The
Edge of Heaven.
A novel production idea, which almost
worked, was to make Iago’s insidious poisoning of Othello’s mind be done by telephone. I sat behind a large block masquerading as
an office desk while Peter Wells rang me from a red telephone box, hired from
somewhere, which was parked to one side on the floor of the hall. It was a real telephone box – it really
worked -- and the phone on my desk actually rang. The block posing as the desk became in the
last act the bed on which I had to strangle Desdemona. She wasn’t a Mary Ure or a Maggie Smith,
being rather dumpy and homely, with thick frizzy hair. She lay there looking lumpy under a sheet,
and having stabbed myself, I had to fall on top of her, which was uncomfortable
for us both.
There were some sniggers from the audience
along the way – for instance when a bathing beauty leaned seductively against a
phallic pillar and it swayed, and when Emilia rushed off screaming, ‘Help! Help, ho!
Help! The Moor hath killed my
mistress! Murder! Murder!’ And Mike
Fletcher, as Montano, then rushed onstage and in his best blustering, bothered
voice, inquired, ‘What is the matter?’
Cherwell, less playful this time, headlined
its review, ‘Murder Most Foul.’ It said,
‘Despite Univ Players’ Othello, modern-dress Shakespeare is not necessarily a
travesty … Of a producer who could cut the Willow Song and render meaningless
“Put out the light” one could expect anything.
In the farcical extravaganza that started Othello, one got it … In the
opening rounds Shakespeare took some heavy punishment, but by the end he was
fighting back gamely. The chief
sufferers were the two leading actors.
To be sure, Mr Tydeman did his best to relieve the presumed tedium of
their longer speeches and more important scenes by casual byplay in the
background … This was a pity, for Gordon Honeycombe had a fine voice and figure
(the two absolute essentials for Othello) and Peter Wells gave the best
performance of the evening … The production was distinctly tatty: even the set
sometimes shuddered … For the college that so splendidly presented The Skin of
Our Teeth last year, Othello was a crime against Shakespeare and our
expectations.’ It seemed as if I might
never act in Oxford
again.
AD and Doris Schwyn came to see me as
Othello and were reassuring and complimentary.
The following morning I showed them around Univ and we had lunch in the
Mitre Hotel. AD wrote in her Memories,
‘It was during this lunch that I noticed that Ronald did not look very well: he
was unnaturally pale and had lost weight.
When questioned, he said he was
quite well, apart from feeling over-tired at the time … I was also told that he
was now using his middle name, Gordon, instead of Ronald.’
The OUDS production of King Lear was
presented in the Playhouse Theatre in Oxford
in the Sixth Week, which began on Monday, 24 February. Having seen it after appearing in Othello I
couldn’t help thinking that the Edinburgh
Academy’s productions of Shakespeare’s
plays, especially Twelfth Night, were better than those staged at Oxford.
In the Seventh Week, those of us freshmen
who were reading English sat our Prelims – Preliminary Examinations in English,
Anglo-Saxon and Latin, which were held in the Examination Schools building down
the road from Univ to assess our academic progress. Bill Tydeman had gained a Distinction in
Prelims the year before. I didn’t, but
as I had a liking for Anglo-Saxon and Latin did well enough. From then on, these last two subjects were
dropped and we were more free to concentrate on obtaining a good English degree
– as well as on our various pursuits and activities.
A more festive event took place in the
Eighth Week, on Wednesday, 12 March, when an Oxford Academical Dinner was held
in the Alington Room in Univ. There
were three of us Academicals at Univ – Alan McGregor and myself, and DCP
Gracie, an older cousin of WP Gracie.
Also present were AAI Wedderburn and PR Newton (who had played Cordelia
in the Academy’s Lear) from Exeter; WD Prosser, Ross Anderson and J Murray (the
Dux in 1954) from Corpus Christi; John Gordon and DM Baxendine from St John’s;
IG Dresser and HJL Allan (Nanki-Poo in The Mikado) from Worcester; AL Stewart
and GPT Whurr from St Edmund Hall; RM Greenshields from Lincoln; DJ Reid from
St Peter’s Hall; and GMR Smith from Christ Church. Three Accies also came over from Cambridge. To my sorrow Nutty Walker wasn’t one of them,
but Harry Usher, the Dux in 1955, was.
The only ones of this group I met up with thereafter,
apart from Alan McGregor, were John Gordon and Ross Anderson. The others faded out of my life, until the
next reunion. None of the others had
ever been in my social group at the Academy.
The Hilary Term ended on Saturday, 15
March, and a week or so later I went camping with Sid Bradley, in the far
northwest of Scotland.
It was a crazy thing to do, as it was
still cold and wintry in Sutherland, and the tops of the mountains, as we
found, were dusted with snow. There were
no camping-sites, and the largely treeless and unpopulated landscape was an
ancient wilderness of monolithic mountains, rivers, moors and peat-bogs that
could have represented Tolkien’s Mordor.
Some Precambrian rock formations, of Torridon sandstone and gneiss, were
the oldest in the world. Forests of
pine, the haunt of wolves, had once cloaked the slopes and valleys, and eagles
had soared overhead. The forests and wolves had gone, but the
occasional eagle was still to be seen. Our ultimate destination was Cape Wrath, the
extreme north-western tip of Scotland
and the British Isles. Norsemen had named the cape the Hvarf, the
Turning-point, after which they sailed their long-boats southwards through the
Hebridean islands to Dublin
and beyond. To those of them who came
from Norway and had settled
in the Orkneys and Shetlands, the far north of Britain was Sutherland (the
Southern Land).
A lot of thought went into working out
what we should take with us and wear. I
wasn’t much help, not having embarked on such an expedition before, apart from
the single night in the Yarrow
Valley with Bill Nicoll
and Adrian Carswell when I was at school.
As I was returning to the homeland of my Scottish ancestors, the Frasers
(although they came from the Inverness area
further south), I wore a Black Watch kilt, with boots, brown stockings with red
flashes, and no sporran. We both had
windcheaters, thick jerseys, woollen scarves and walking-sticks. Sid’s knitted jersey was white and his
corduroy trousers black.
We got there by train and bus, ending up
in Lairg, from where we hitch-hiked along the westerly road, via Strath Oykell,
intending to spend the night in Lochinver.
But Lochinver was further off than we’d thought, and as it was now late
afternoon we asked to be dropped off on the A837 at the southern end of Loch
Assynt, where there was what seemed on the map to be a hamlet called
Inchnadamph. But all that was there was
a hotel and no farm with outbuildings, no shelter of any kind. So we returned to the road, which was now
void of any vehicles. We were stuck
where we were. It was getting darker
and colder and a chill wind blew. What
looked like a ruined croft was among the heather and tussocky grass between us
and a river. We investigated. A weather-worn door yielded to our shoving
and we found ourselves in an empty space that had evidently been used as a
shelter for sheep. It would now shelter
us from the rising gale streaking down the river valley from the south.
Offloading our heavy rucksacks, crammed
with whatever wet-weather and warm clothing, sleeping-bags and food supplies
Sid had thought we needed, we settled down.
He had brought a primus stove and did all the cooking. I helped with the washing up. Meals were mostly variations of baked beans,
eggs and bacon, with fruit and bread and jam and mugs of tea. The sheep-shelter was made cosy by
candle-light (his idea) and the angled beams of our torches. We only ventured into the windy and
strangely luminous night to pee against the sheltered northern side of the
croft. There must have been moonshine
behind the clouds, for the spectral outlines of river and hills and the crags
on the other side of the road were dimly visible.
I was fast asleep in my snug sleeping-bag
when I was awakened by Sid suddenly sitting up, half up out of his. He mumbled, ‘We’ve got to get out – it’s going
to fall.’ Slightly alarmed I asked him
what he was talking about, and he muttered something and then lay down and both
of us went back to sleep. In the
morning he said he’d had a vivid dream, in which the crags on the other side of
the road were threatening to collapse on top of us. And no, he said he’d never been a
sleep-walker, although he’d been told by his older brother that he talked in
his sleep.
Washing ourselves that morning, and
washing up dishes, was enlivened by the chilly spray being whipped up by the
icy wind and blown off the tops of little waves on the river. On the loch the waves were larger. I didn’t shave on the expedition and grew a
scruffy beard.
We decided to climb neighbouring Ben More
Assynt, the highest mountain in Sutherland at 3,274 feet, whose lower slopes
loomed up behind the hotel at Inchnadamph.
We followed a path by a cascading stream that led to some waterfalls and
the summit. Beside the path was a stone
memorial to a plane crew whose bomber had crashed on the mountain during the
war. After an hour or so we were driven
back by descending misty clouds and flurries of snow, and back on level ground
wandered around the edge of Loch Assynt, where the weather was now calmer, to a
rocky promontory projecting into the loch, on which stood the ruins of Ardvreck
Castle. Once a three-storied keep with
extensive walled courtyards, it had belonged to the Clan Macleod, and was
destroyed by a mysterious fire in 1737.
We rambled separately about the ruins, which were said to be haunted,
wondering about the people who had lived there and the lives they had led.
We had thought of attempting to climb on the
following day one or other of the isolated mountains of Suilven or Canisp to
the south of the loch, but their slopes were steeper than those of Ben More and
their tops hidden in low cloud. Instead
we decided to move on. That night we
warmed ourselves in the bar lounge of the hotel at Inchnadamph, drank beer and
had a meal.
In the morning we hitched a lift to
Scourie, where we were allowed to lodge in a big stone barn among piled up
bales of straw. After exploring the
west coast settlement and feasting off fish and chips, we made enquiries and
found two local fishermen who were prepared to take us to an offshore island
called Handa. I wanted to go there as
I’d read in a guidebook that the island had once had its own queen (the oldest
widow) and governing council. It was
now a sea-bird sanctuary, having been abandoned by its inhabitants almost 100
years ago.
The fishermen dropped us off at the low
southern shore of the island, which was about a mile square. From there the ground rose to over 350 feet
in the north and west where it sheered off into sea-cliffs swarming with
puffins, razorbills and guillemots. We
sat on the grass opposite a sea-stack, a pillar of rock that had been separated
from the cliffs by the actions of the sea and wind, while puffins rocketed past
us. As we had three hours to fill we
explored further. The lower reaches of
Handa revealed some ruined crofts and a chapel. I
wondered at what hardships, of weather and want, the people who had lived there
must have endured – and whether we would be forgotten by the fishermen and
marooned. But their small boat returned
to take us back to the mainland and a meal.
From Scourie we ventured further north up
the coast, hitching a lift to an inlet harbour at Kinlochbervie, a more
substantial village from where fishing-boats set forth into the Atlantic. Here we
hoped to find some means of transport to Sandwood
Bay, a fine long
beach south of Cape Wrath, where
the ruins of a house by the bay were said to be haunted, and many ships had
been wrecked, from long-ships to a Spanish galleon, their bones buried in the
sand. But the weather was uncertain,
and although it was only four miles to the bay, it was four miles back. The track that led there was unsuitable for
bicycles. So we never saw the golden
sands of Sandwood Bay, said by some to be the finest beach in Britain and
certainly the furthest north.
We now set about getting a lift to our
final destination, Durness, a scattered village on the north coast set back
from the Bay of Balnakiel. Here we found shelter in an outhouse of a
farmhouse and stayed there for several nights, exploring the area. We scrambled over the stones of a ruined
broch by the Kyle of Durness, looking for flints, and ventured into the
dripping gigantic maw of Smoo
Cave a mile or so to the
east. Offshore lay the dark outline of
an island, Eilean Hoan, where the Celts had long ago entombed their dead to
preserve them from the ravages of mainland wolves. Missionaries had come here from Iona and
built a small stone church by a stream that flowed into the southern reaches of
Balnakiel Bay.
Its ruins were bordered by a small cemetery where gravestones surfaced
from thick grass. Here also it was said
that a man had been buried upright, as at Inchcolm.
Near the church was a large white-walled
house that presented its back to the wide reaches of the shallow bay. This mansion, belonging to Clan Mackay, had
been built on the site of a primitive monastery that served the church. The house was visible from miles away, even
from the far end of Faraid Head which formed the northern edge of the bay. When the tide went out, vast areas of sand
were spread with mirrors for the sky, and our footprints were silently erased
when the tide crept in as far as the low dunes below Balnakiel House.
There was a Craft Village
near Durness that was making use of some abandoned MOD property, and it was
here that we hired bicycles for getting about.
There was a pub and a hotel, the Durness Inn and the Cape Wrath Hotel,
where we ate and drank. Once, when Sid
was putting together a breakfast in the farmhouse barn, the primus stove caught
fire. It flamed up, and as we were
camped among bales of hay I had visions of the whole place burning to the ground. But Sid heroically picked up the flaming
primus, took it outside and extinguished the fire.
The weather had generally been good – it
had been cloudy and cold but it hadn’t rained – and on what seemed to be a
promising day of calm and clear weather, we set out on our bikes, hired at a
garage, for the Kyle of Durness, where a large row-boat took us and our bikes
across the waters of the sea-loch to the other side.
It was eleven miles from the Kyle of
Durness to the lighthouse at Cape Wrath, and
that meant it was eleven miles back. I
had never cycled so far in my life, not even a few miles. The wind was mostly against us on the outer
journey and the treeless wastes of heather-covered moorland land and peat-bog
kept rising. There were downhill
slopes, but most were uphill and there was always the exhausting wind opposing
us. Halfway there we left the bicycles
in the roadside heather and made a detour by foot to a neighbouring hill,
Sgribhis Bheinn, beyond which were the highest cliffs in Britain, the Great Cliffs, Clo Mor.
Much of what we did in and saw in
Sutherland I used in my first novel, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, published 11
years later – especially our diversion to Clo Mor, the Great Cliffs, the
highest in Britain.
We came to a bed of shale, with the
mountain shouldering suddenly upward on our right. There was a murmurous shrieking in the air,
confused with the very faint concussive sounds of waves cascading on a
shore. Then before us a faraway ocean
appeared, whose hazy waters ran up and out to merge with a wash of low-lying
clouds. We were now only twenty yards or
so from the scribbled horizontal of the brink, but as yet saw no cliffs, just
the sea at a tangent far beyond. We
soldiered on, parallel with the coastline, heading for higher ground and attended
by the humming wind, now alive with the voices of seabirds still unseen. It seemed that from a promontory, a jutting
knee of Sgribhis Bheinn thrusting out a short way from the land, we would see
most. At our feet a chasm split across
our path – as if a giant’s axe had bit into the mountain mass. At the chasm’s inland end we could see, looking
warily down, the small slow surf far below, and when we moved onto the chasm’s
other side, to a promontory and the high capella of the cliffs, the eastward
prospect sank away, but not into the sea.
To the
east the mountain’s rubbled side slid steeply downward onto a cliff-top plateau
fanning out for miles south-east, exposing all the misty breadth beyond of Balnakiel Bay.
When we turned to our left the prospect westward opened up to reveal two
miles of high and lunging precipices diminishing before us to Cape
Wrath. Specks of
sea-birds, gulls and auks, dotted the face of sheer descents, while tiny waves
chewed at the rocks and shingle at their base.
The air was full of sounds and sunshine and the small movements of the
birds.
I suffered much from vertigo then, and as
I leaned against and clung to the slope of the mountain behind me, Sid walked
out onto the grassy platform of the promontory and then crawled towards the
edge. He told me that when he looked
down, there was only the sea a great distance beneath him – an outright fall
through space and air before him. He
saw no cliff, no birds and ledges, only the grey sea with white knuckles waving
below him. The cliff-top here, riding
the void, overhung its base, putting half his body over nothingness.
This I didn’t see, and could never have
seen without hurling myself over the edge.
After Sid had crawled back to me and stood we turned eastwards to view
the easterly panorama, I with my right hand held out ready to grasp tufts of
grass, anything, as I still felt unsteady.
I had a camera, and after I’d taken a few uncertain shots of the
westerly march of the cliffs, Sid suggested one of me and the easterly
view. I edged out nervously onto the
mountain slope, turned to face him -- and the ground gave way beneath me.
‘Hold it!’ he said, and I did, desperately
clawing the side of the mountain, expecting at any moment to tumble down
hundreds of feet to the boulders below.
I managed to edge back to him, most carefully, while he doubled up with
laughter. ‘You should have seen your
face!’ he chortled.
Returning to our bikes we toiled on to Cape Wrath. The
lighthouse there perched on a high wide headland, three hundred feet above the
sea. Long low walls enclosed a small
community, with white cottages, little gardens and outhouses. The lighthouse had been built in 1828, and
the lighthouse keeper led us up iron ladders into the circular chamber at the
top, where the great light, encased in mirrors, slowly revolved. He told us about its maintenance and
working. He said that he and the few
who lived there read a lot, and that they had enjoyed a mild winter, with no
snow. It was usually like that, he
said, because of the nearness of the Gulf Stream. That winter a powerless ship had been driven
onto the rocks south of the Cape.
The journey back over the eleven miles
back to the ferry was easier. There was
no contrary wind to baffle us and it didn’t rain. But I was very tired by the time we reached
the Kyle of Durness. After telephoning
to Keoldale across the Kyle from a hillside cottage by the landing-stage, we
waited for the ferryman who lived at Keoldale to row his boat over to where we
were and fetch us on like Charon. In
the meantime the crofters of the cottage took us into their living-room and fed
us generously with home-made scones and cakes, boiled eggs and buttered bread
and several cups of tea. Their son, a
shepherd, sat with us but hardly spoke.
His black and white collie dog lay under his chair.
The people of the far northwest were kind
and conversational. In shops and pubs
they always showed an interest in us, and if met on the road never passed by
without a greeting and a comment on the weather. We were, I suppose, a striking pair, very
tall, one fair, one dark. No one
treated us like strangers in this barren, majestic land.
When the ferryman arrived, we put our
bicycles in the boat and embarked on the ebbing tide. It was colder on the sea-loch, the waters
dark and choppy. The ferryman told us
how summer visitors were always keen to try their own strength at the
oars. Sid took the hint and rowed us back
to Keoldale, while the ferryman sat at the stern and steered us to the shore.
After disembarking at the stone pier at
Keoldale we cycled the last two weary miles back to Durness, and after
returning our bikes to the garage walked down the track to the white house on
Balnakiel Bay and to our temporary home.
Two days later, we left Sutherland in two
fish lorries, hitching a lift in them at Lochinver, where we watched the
fishing-boats return to the harbour at dusk and unload their catches, which
were then crated and loaded into lorries, as were we, for the overnight journey
south.
Those
ten days in Sutherland made a deep and lasting impression on me and I used the
experience as a background for my first novel, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. For some reason, whenever Sid and I went away
together, we always got on very well – less well sometimes when we were both
pursuing our own very different interests and occupations.
Back at Oxford for the start of the Trinity or Summer
Term on Sunday, 27 April, 1958, I became involved in another Univ Players
production, John Milton’s masque, Comus, in which I played the Attendant
Spirit, Thyrsis. The masque was first staged and seen at Ludlow Castle
in 1634. It was written in rhyming
couplets and being quite brief was performed without an interval.
Peter Wells was Comus; Bill Tydeman was
one of the brothers, and the female parts were played by girls from Lady
Margaret Hall, one of whom, Julia Donald, later accompanied me to the Summer
Ball at the end of the term. As with
Othello the music was specially composed by Eve Barsham; the stage director was
Richard Samuel, and the producer was a friend of Bill Tydeman, a classicist and
a scholar, Derek Wood. Comus’s beastly
crew, wearing masks, were played by a few athletic types from Univ and friends
of Bill and Derek, and Sabrina, nymph of the River Severn (the lovely Sylvia
Baggs with an unlovely surname) was attended by three sturdy LMH girls. She also arranged the dances they performed.
As the helpful Shepherd I wore a sort of
smock and tights and too much make-up, and as the Attendant Spirit, with too
much eye and eyebrow make-up, I wore a flowing multi-coloured mantle, white
blouse and pale blue tights. And I
should have worn a jock-strap rather than loose underpants. I also had to sing, ‘Sabrina fair, listen
where thou art sitting,’ etc, while indicating, as if with semaphore flags, the
sky, the woods, the river, etc.
The masque was presented in the gardens of
LMH for four nights at 8.30 pm, and our shared changing-rooms were among some
bushes. The audience sat on collapsible
wooden chairs. On the first night,
Tuesday, 13 May it rained, and a dog wandered across the stage.
The Isis
reviewer commented on ‘the macabre pleasure of hearing (or, as it turned out,
half-hearing) over a thousand lines in praise of chastity in Lady Margaret Hall
gardens.’ He went on, ‘In fact, what
never reached the audience’s ears was more than compensated for by what hit
their eyes: first a dance of slightly stocky nymphs swathed in contour-hugging
net, and heavy-footed swains apparently draped with ivy and smeared with brown
boot-polish, and then a Morris dance by six thinly disguised Tyrolean
scoutmasters … Between these purely visual joys the Attendant Spirit hammered
the air with gestures straight out of a slow-motion film of an Eton Fives game,
and Comus and the Lady struggled gallantly and even well against the hazards of
cold, midges, impending rain, and an over-sized dog which apparently wanted to
join the fun.’
Cherwell’’s review was brief and properly
critical: ‘The standard of verse-speaking
was very high … But even by Jacobean standards the acting was unconvincing …
Movement and gestures were overdone.
Particular offender here was Gordon Honeycombe … But he used his voice to
good advantage. Susan Diamond as the
Lady was also pleasant to listen to and Sylvia Baggs brought charm to the brief
appearance of the River Nymph. The OU
Morris Men provided the brightest moments of the evening.’
The Oxford Magazine, despite the rain
pattering on the umbrellas of the audience, was, however, pleased by the
production. Its reviewer said, ‘On the
whole a happy mean was struck between stylisation and nature. The Attendant Spirit (Gordon Honeycombe) did
best in this way. His acting was
somewhat biased towards the stylised – a mistake on the right side, though he
held his elbows too high for too long.
He and the Lady had the best instinct for timing among the players, and
during his appearances the play seemed to hold together better than at other
times.’ So far I had only acted in two
college productions and had not taken part in any of the plays presented by the
OUDS and the ETC.
It was during this Trinity Term that Sid
and I were given extra tutorials, separately, in semantics. How words originated and how languages
evolved and words altered in sound, sense and spelling, was interesting, as was
the 34-year-old tutor, who had an almost foppish appearance, with his bow-ties,
velvet smoking jackets and thick, wavy hair.
Whether I made him nervous, as I hardly spoke, or whether he was a
highly strung and nervy person, I don’t know.
But during the tutorial he used to agitatedly fill a pipe with tobacco
and puff away at it, and when he wasn’t doing so he gesticulated with it while
stalking about his study room, expounding on semantics and scarcely looking at
me. He lived in a low house in Longwall Street and
his name was CR (Christopher) Tolkien.
He was the third and youngest son of JRR
Tolkien. His wife sometimes appeared
with cups of coffee and there used to be domestic noises offstage. His first son, Simon, was born the following
year. I had read The Hobbit, which had
been published in 1936, but not The Lord of the Rings, whose three volumes
didn’t appear until 1954-55 and didn’t achieve their general fame until the
1960s. So I was unaware that
Christopher’s father was anything other than the author of a quaintly
imaginative children’s story and totally unaware that Christopher himself had
drawn the maps for The Lord of the Rings.
The sessions with him were a bit of a trial for both of us, but I
absorbed something of what he told me about the origins of words.
Meanwhile, the social round of summer in Oxford swiftly passed
with sociable mornings or afternoons punting on the river, or in walks by the
river and in cinema and theatre outings, and in bottle parties at other
colleges or in other people’s digs.
While in Scotland, Sid and I had dreamed up
a Scottish society called the Haggis Club, which was supposed to meet for
dinner every full moon. The President
was Alan McGregor and I was the Scribe.
Wearing DJ (dinner jackets) or dress kilts, about 20 Scots, including
some from the Academy, and some from other colleges, assembled in a private
room in Univ and polished off platefuls of haggis, turnips and mashed potatoes
washed down with whisky and beer. It
was a jolly but artificial do and not an event destined to occur every term,
let alone at every full moon. Only one
other dinner was held.
The first dinner must have been in the
Eighth Week, in the middle of June, when college rowing eights competed in the
Head of the River races on the Isis, rowing
upstream in a staggered line and endeavouring to bump the stern of the boat in
front and not be bumped by the boat behind.
Similar races, called Torpids, were held in the Hilary Term by other
less high-powered eights.
Univ had a decorative white barge moored
beside the river, which was used by the college oarsmen as a club-house. Spectators were allowed onto its flat roof
during Eights Week, crowding onto the side facing the river, and from there I
saw Sid row in the college’s first eight – there were five in all. The Captain of Boats that year was John
Newman, whose sister Joan Newman, also at Oxford,
I would get to know.
In 1960 one of the eights was coxed by
small, slim, bespectacled Stephen Hawking, who was specialising in physics at Univ
at the time. He had come up to Oxford the previous year,
when he was 17. In October 1962 he
moved to Cambridge,
to do a postgraduate degree there.
Sid much enjoyed being among the
extrovert, joshing and jokey fraternity of the rowers. Adept at sociable, blokey exchanges, he was
in his element. I felt out of place among
them and was never invited by him onto the barge. The Univ
oarsmen trained on the river in all sorts of weather, while their coach,
speeding along the tow-path on a bicycle, kept abreast of them and shouted advice
and encouragement. When the eight
bumped another college’s boat, or even two, they had a rowdy Bump Supper in
Univ and made a lot of noise in the quads.
But so did the rugby players, who celebrated every inter-college victory
by getting smashed – and smashing furniture.
Cricketers were generally more restrained.
It was about this time that I was courted
one morning by a stranger, a repetition of my experience with the American in Hong Kong. A
short-haired, red-faced man in his early forties, with a small military type of
moustache, he was standing in the main quad looking lost, and I asked him if I
could help him. He said he was visiting
Oxford and
looking around the colleges. He asked
me about myself and Univ, and as I had nothing to do and he was pleasantly
spoken and seemed inoffensive I volunteered to show him around. I did so and he then asked me if I would
have lunch with him, in return for my kindness. A free lunch was not to be turned down and
so we went to a smart restaurant in the High Street, where I enjoyed the meal
but felt increasingly discomfited by his company and by the fact that he was so
much older than me. So when he asked me
if I would have dinner with him that night, at the Mitre where he was staying,
though tempted I declined. It hadn’t
occurred to me that he might have had an ulterior motive. But it occurred to Sid, who when I told him
about my encounter and the free meal reproved me for my naivety and warned me
about talking to strange men.
Cafés rather than restaurants were frequented
by us impoverished students, unless they were Chinese or Indian ones. Hotels like the Mitre and the Randolph were way beyond
our financial means. Pubs were of
course popular, and the hostelries favoured by most of us at Univ, apart from
our own Beer Cellar, were the nearby Eastgate and the Bear. It was also most pleasurable to take packs
of bottled beer to Magdalen Bridge, hire a punt from the rows of those that were
tied up there, and punt up or down a shallow tributary of the Isis
that was called the Cherwell. If you
punted upstream to the playing-fields in the University Parks, you came across
a secluded grassy area on the left bank of the river called Parson’s Pleasure,
where dons and daring students sunbathed nude.
Some bold nudists stood up to
wave at passing punts and display their wares.
Others sensibly covered their faces, rather than their wares, with a
newspaper or a towel.
Mostly we punted or drifted downstream to
the Cherwell’s junction with the Isis, with
chums or female companions reclining on the cushions, and perhaps a punnet of
strawberries and a bottle of cheap red wine or some bottles of beer. Punters were known to fall into the river if
their pole became stuck in the mud, or if they were inebriated and showing off. Alan McGregor once fell in and almost
drowned. He lay on the bottom of the
river, looking up, and felt quite happy, he said.
Cheap red wine was known as plonk. When going to a bottle party in someone’s
rooms you took a bottle of plonk, which you never drank, studying the labels of
other bottles to see which ones were superior to yours and drinking from
them. You had to be back in Univ by
midnight, when the doors of the main entrance were locked, and no girls were
theoretically allowed to remain in college after 7.0 pm.
Eating out was popular, especially at
small cheap ethnic restaurants like the Moti Mahal, and I for one went to the
cinema every week, usually with Sid, as well as to the theatre. Frank Hauser had formed a repertory company
called the Meadow Players, which tended to stage unknown and foreign plays,
acted by young professionals like Judi Dench, Barbara Jefford, Leo McKern and
Edward Woodward, who were paid £25 a week.
At the major theatre in the town, the New Theatre, I saw a touring
company perform West Side Story and was enthralled.
The social climax of the summer term was a
Summer Ball. These weren’t annual
events, but were laid on by colleges every three years and were not all held at
the same time. If you wished, you could
attend balls at other colleges than your own.
Dinner jackets were a must for the men, or a dress kilt. I wore a DJ. Several marquees and dance-floors were
erected within the college gardens and quads and there were three or four bands
or pop groups, but no famous ones.
Early British rockers, like the Everley Brothers, Tommy Steele and Marty
Wilde, had their beginnings about this time, as did Cliff Richard and the
Drifters. Hit songs were Singing the
Blues and Volare, as well as the songs from West Side Story and those from the film
of South Pacific.
My partner was Julia Donald, who had been
the non-speaking Countess of Bridgewater in Comus. I enjoyed dancing, but she turned out to be
rather heavy-footed and not very lively, and so I spent most of the time
carousing with chums and dancing with their partners, like Joan Newman and the
girls from LMH who were reading English.
When the Trinity Term and my first year at
Oxford ended on
21 June 1958, Sid went off with the Univ Boat Club and rowed at the Henley
Regatta. This was at the beginning of
July, after which he had a vacation job, a common summer occupation for
students who needed to make some extra money and enable them to pay their
Battels when they returned to Oxford. I had hoped that we might find time to
holiday somewhere, but this didn’t happen.
As it was, I also had a vacation job, on the radio, as a continuity
announcer with the Scottish Home Service in Glasgow.
How this happened I can’t recall. I expect my mother had something to do with
it. Or perhaps, having been a
continuity announcer at an outpost of the BBC in Hong Kong
I had boldly written to their Scottish outpost about the possibility of some
employment there. However it happened,
I was employed at the BBC’s Scottish HQ in Queen Margaret Drive for three months or
so in the summer of 1958.
My mother rented a flat not far from BBC Scotland, and I
walked to work virtually every day.
There were three permanent announcers with the Scottish Home Service,
and while I was there, the three of them, Alistair McIntyre, Bill Jack and
Harry Grey, took it in turns to go on leave.
They were all about 20 years older than me, and although I only saw them
when a shift ended or began and we handed over to one another, they were
welcoming and friendly. There wasn’t
that much for a continuity announcer to do, as most of the BBC’s Home Service
programmes were broadcast nationwide from London. As I remember we were mainly used to provide
the weather forecasts for Scotland
and to read the local news. Sometimes
there were local programmes, like concerts, to introduce, and at the end of the
day we had to sign off, play the National Anthem and wish everyone goodnight.
Everything was timed to the second, and I
sat in a small studio, wearing ear-phones, waiting for a red light, operated by
an out-of-sight engineer, to turn green, when a sign lit up saying that I was
ON AIR. Most of the time I was watching a second-hand
jerk its way around a large clock in front of me. If there was music being played, of any
kind, it had to end precisely when required.
It could be started and played silently, then faded up. Timing was paramount.
The weather forecast was read from this
studio, but news-reading was done in a cubicle near the newsroom. I would sit at a small desk in front of a
microphone and read from bits of paper on which separate stories were
typed. To one side sat a sub-editor,
with his eyes on a clock, and as I was reading he would sometimes reach out and
score through a sentence or a phrase, or take a news item from my hand and
emend it or put it to one side. The
trick was to make what I was reading sound fluent and all of a piece.
Although we announcers were never identified
by name, I knew my mother would be listening in our rented flat down the road,
not to mention some relatives, former teachers and Academicals, and this helped
me to personalise the news, as if I was talking to people I knew. This I also did when I was reading the
television news. One day an item of
news was very personal. I had to
announce that two fishermen had been drowned in a boating accident off the island of Handa in Sutherland. They must have been the two men who had taken
Sid and me to Handa a few months ago.
It helped to have travelled in Scotland and to
know how to pronounce certain names. If
in doubt it was best to ask someone in the newsroom. It was
a pleasure to enunciate some Scottish names like Auchtermuchty and Drumnadrochit,
and as I had Scottish ancestors I pronounced ‘loch’ correctly, and not, as the
English did, as ‘lock’. But I sometimes
got it wrong. Milngavie was not
pronounced as spelt, as I had thought, but as Mulguy. A slip of the tongue caused another error,
when in a weather forecast I referred to Shetney and Orkland – instead of
Orkney and Shetland.
There were other errors. The demands of precise timing once led me to
fade out a choral concert before the climax of the piece. It was over-running, and not being familiar
with the piece, I didn’t know when and how it would end. On tenterhooks I watched the second-hand
tick remorselessly on as the choir reached its climax. Before it did so – and I believe it was just
before the fortissimo finale – I had to fade it out and hand over to the next
programme. There were complaints, but
what else could I do?
My most notable bloomer occurred when I
had to introduce the various items in a live afternoon concert given by the BBC
Scottish Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis, who had only been appointed the
previous year. Not only had I to
introduce each piece, I had to write the introductions. ‘What should I say?’ I whinged, and was
referred by a programme editor to a music compendium for information about the
relevant composers and their compositions.
I should of course have talked to Colin Davis, but he was not available
and I only saw him when I walked into the concert hall, a large and lofty room
at Queen Margaret Drive. He was standing on the podium, ready to
begin, and I sat down at a desk to one side and waited for a green light before
doing my serious BBC best to sound knowledgeable about what the orchestra were
going to play. The first item was the
Overture from an opera, La Cenerentola, and I confidently informed the
listening audience, as well as Colin Davis and the orchestra, that it was
written by Donizetti. I added some
interesting biographical details and sat back as, without any hesitation, the
orchestra launched itself into the Overture, after which they all regarded me
with some curiosity, uncertain as to what I was going to say next. In fact the Overture they had played was not
by Donizetti but by Rossini. I hadn’t
noticed in my researches into La Cenerentola that two operas with that title
had been written, by Rossini and Donizetti.
I had chosen the wrong one and the wrong composer.
After the concert Colin Davis kindly
informed me about the proper name of the composer. It was embarrassing and I felt like a fool. But as
far as I remember, no one complained, for I had spoken with conviction, and
possibly the listening audience, if anyone was listening, thought they had
misheard. This also turned out to be
the rule if you got it wrong when reading the TV news. By correcting an error, you drew attention to
it. It was better to carry on
confidently, and let the audience believe that they had misheard what you said.
One weekend I went off with two young men
on a camping trip to Loch Lomond. They lived in a flat in our building and no
doubt my mother had made friends with them and invited them in for a cup of tea
and a chat. I must have visited them in
return, but had no particular interest in either of them or their
occupations. One, I think, was an accountant. Nonetheless, when asked if I would like to
join them on a weekend expedition to Loch Lomond, I said ‘Yes’, being glad to
escape from Glasgow and my mother’s company, and despite them being virtual
strangers. As it was, they slept in one
tent and I in another and all that happened was that we went for walks. They were capable campers – I did nothing to
help. I think one had been a Boy Scout
and still attended their gatherings as a Scout Leader.
My off-duty moments were generally spent
reading or visiting my mother’s relations.
While I was at the BBC she may also have met up with Bob Finlayson –
although I don’t recollect that his name was ever mentioned after my father
returned to Scotland. Besides, she was now 60 and the relationship
had probably ended some years ago.
And so, after three months of living in Glasgow, she and I returned to Edinburgh
at the end of September, and I returned to Oxford, in time for the First Week of the
Michaelmas Term, which began on Sunday, 12 October 1958, and the start of my
second year. I was now 22.
Although we were Commoners, Sid and I had
asked for rooms in college and were lucky to be given single sets of rooms at
the bottom of Staircase 7. I was in 7.1
and he was opposite me in 7.2. In
between us was the passage that led from the Main Quad to the Radcliffe
Quad. Our windows looked out on both
quads. We each had our own living-room
and bedroom and our names on strips of metal above our doors. When I unexpectedly left Univ before the end
of that term I unscrewed the black metal strip, on which ‘Mr Honeycombe’ had
been painted in white, and kept it as a souvenir. I still have it, and it now sits above my
study door.
I was charged ten shillings by the
college for the name plate, the sum appearing in my Battels for the 1958
Michaelmas Term up to 9 December.
Board and Lodging amounted to £47-15-9 that term; Tuition Fees were again
£21; Electric Power £4-3-6; and Laundry £2-7-4.
That must have been for bed linen.
The Battels’ total came to
£104-3-8. There was a reminder at the
foot of the Battels that ‘members must pay outstanding accounts before coming
into residence’ and we were reminded that ‘the date for coming into residence
for Hilary Term 1959’ was 15 January.
I wrote to my mother in the Second Week
asking her to see if she could get my Scottish bursary increased (she had
managed to inveigle an annual grant of £36 out of the Edinburgh authorities) as
the grants given to students educated in England had gone up. I also asked her to send my gym-shoes to me,
and a toasting-fork. ‘Last week was
pretty idle,’ I wrote. ‘But it seems I’m
going to be busy this week – I’m producing a 1 Act Play for the College in the
4th week of this term.’
Rehearsals of the play must have taken
place over a two week period, as the OUDS Drama Competition, called Cuppers,
which Univ Players had entered, was held from Tuesday, 4 November to Saturday,
8 November 1958. Performances began in
the Wesley Hall in New Inn Hall
Street at 7.30 pm.
People were invited ‘to see 19 plays for
only five shillings.’ Members of OUDS
were charged two shillings, and they paid sixpence for the nightly group
sessions of plays, which were all one-act plays, whether written as such or
presented as an act from a full-length play.
19 of the Oxford
colleges competed, four of them being women’s colleges, and the plays were
staged over the five nights four at a time, except on the last night when the
three that were presented were followed by the adjudication. The adjudicator was my tutor, Peter Bayley,
and it was probably he who suggested in the first place that Univ Players take
part.
After reading Cat on a Hot Tin Roof -- the
film version was released in September the previous year – I had read some of
Tennessee Williams’ other plays and discovered that his output included several
one-act plays. In all he wrote over 70
of them. For reasons that escape me
now, I thought that one of them, The Strangest Kind of Romance, which had one
set and a cast of four, would be an interesting entry for Cuppers.
At a
meeting of the Univ Players committee, who included Bill Tydeman and Derek
Wood, I proposed that I should direct the play, although I had never directed a
play before – Neddie Seagoon’s Schooldays at the Academy didn’t really
count. They agreed, provided that I
accepted a freshman as co-producer.
This didn’t please me, as I thought I was capable of directing a one-act
play on my own. But the freshman, who
had directed several plays at his school and elsewhere, had arrived that term
in Oxford
trailing clouds of directorial glory.
It made sense if he assisted me and was involved straightaway in a
college production. So I agreed, never
suspecting for a moment that he would be such an influence on my acting career,
at Oxford and
thereafter, especially as I never thought of him as a friend, although we kept
in touch for many years.
John Duncan was a Geordie from Newcastle, grammar-school
educated, and a Scholar, reading English. Apart
from acting in plays and directing them up north he had played cricket for his
county as well as his school. He was
tall and lanky, white-skinned and pimply, with a loose lower lip and straight
fairish hair which he was always pushing out of his eyes and off his
forehead. His pallor made him seem
unhealthy to me, as did the many pints of beer he drank with his college
cronies and the cigarettes he inhaled – so many that his fingers were stained
nicotine-yellow. But none of this was
off-putting to some very attractive intelligent girls.
As I remember, he acted more as an adviser
on The Strangest Kind of Romance, which I doubt that he would ever have chosen
to direct, and he also played the minor part of the Old Man. The leading role of the Little Man was played
by Harvey Bolton, who was nondescript and inoffensive (as the part required)
and spoke clearly. The Boxer was played
by a classicist, Richard Ingrams, looking far from muscular and rather seedy in
a singlet. Joan Newman, who was a bluff
and sturdy girl and looked older than she was, appeared as the Landlady. Joan Newman’s brother, John, had been
Captain of Boats. What was interesting
about brother and sister was that their sexes should have been transposed, as
he was softly spoken, sweet and gentle and she was a bit gruff as well as
bluff. Alan McGregor, who also rowed,
had taken her to the Summer Ball. At a
pre-drinks gathering before the Ball in Staircase 11, when the girls were in
their ball-gowns and we chaps in DJs, Alan noticed an eyelash lying on Joan’s
cleavage and tried to flick it away. He
couldn’t, as it was attached to her.
Also in the cast were Mary Porter and
myself as lodging-house neighbours – and a cat called Nitchevo, which was the
beloved object of the Little Man’s life.
The cast-list in the Cuppers programme said that Nitchevo was played by
Satan. He wasn’t. Before the Dress Rehearsal in the Wesley
Hall I kidnapped the college cat (Satan) and cycled with him sitting in a
basket in front of me – as my mother had once done with our cat in Karachi. Unfortunately, Satan hadn’t read the
play. When shoved onto the stage to
commune with the Little Man, he sat down, centre stage, ignored Harvey Bolton and
stared balefully at the empty hall. He
had to go, and in performance Harvey
talked to an invisible cat – which was apt, as Nitchevo meant, in Russian,
Nothing.
Paul Foot, who was Richard Ingrams’ best
friend – they had both attended Shrewsbury
School -- was a Stage
Assistant, as was Pete Hudson’s room-mate, Keith Jones.
Our play was presented on the third night
of Cuppers, on the Thursday, along with The Rising of the Moon by Lady Gregory
(Christ Church); Amedée by Jules Romains
(Queen’s); and The Veil of Orpheus, ‘A fragment in Greek from Euripides,
Callimachus and Orphic Hymns’ (St Hugh’s).
This production, which had a cast of nine and was set in Hades, was
adjudged by Peter Bayley to be second in the competition. We were fourth. Third place was taken by an original play,
Downstairs, by Caryl Churchill (Oriel), and first was an adaptation by Michael
Kustow of one of the mystery plays, The Crucifixion, presented by Wadham. Kustow
would later on become a long-term associate of Peter Brook and a director at
the National Theatre, where he staged many experimental productions. Magdalen also staged a version of the
Crucifixion, and St Catherine’s a nativity play in verse by Charles Williams,
Seed of Adam.
The Oxford Mail reported that the cast of
Seed of Adam walked off the stage before the end ‘because of the unrestrained
mirth of the audience.’ The last line
of the first scene had been ‘Nuts, nuts, nuts, nuts.’ Michael Billington, who was to become a
noted drama critic, was in the cast. He
said later, ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to play religious verse drama to
a slightly boozy Saturday night Oxford audience, but I don’t recommend it. The play was greeted with mounting hilarity,
and when the heroine cried, “Parturition is upon me!” the audience went wild
with laughter. The director was in the
play and on stage, and at that point hissed to the rest of the cast, “Get
off.” So we obediently trooped off
after him, leaving an empty stage and a frustrated audience baying for more.’
Cuppers may have been so called because of
an Oxford fad
for creating slang neologisms like ‘rugger’, ‘brekker’, and
‘wagger-pagger-bagger’ (a wastepaper basket).
This practice seems to have been introduced to Univ in the 1870s by
students from Rugby. Some
names were also thus altered – Ted becoming ‘Tedders’ and Hampton ‘Hampers’. Catchphrases
from radio comedy shows and from comics, as well as schoolboy slang, were also
often used.
Patrick Garland was now President of the OUDS,
and acted in an OUDS production of Oedipus at Colonus at the Playhouse towards
the end of that November; he played Creon.
I imagine I auditioned for this production, but yet again I was
unsuccessful – which was just as well, as I would never have been able to
appear in it, nor see it. I wasn’t well
and was coughing all over the place.
The college doctor concluded that I had bronchitis and he recommended
rest and soothing syrupy potions.
Fortunately
for me, and fatefully for my future career at Oxford
and thereafter, all the students at Univ were asked in the second or third week
of November to have their lungs checked in a Mass X-Ray Unit that had parked
itself in the High Street and was doing the rounds of all the Oxford colleges. I dutifully pressed my chest against a cold
glass plate and thought nothing more about it -- until a note appeared in the
‘H’ pigeon-hole for letters in the Porter’s Lodge. I was requested to attend a hospital in east
Oxford for a
second X-ray. I did as asked, coughing
my way there on a bus, and again was unconcerned.
But when summoned to see a white-coated
doctor after the X-ray I was told that I had tuberculosis, TB.
It was a shock. Oh doom, I thought – I’m too young to
die. For I was three years younger than
Keats when he died, and I hadn’t written as much verse as he had, just 21
sonnets besides some other verses. The
doctor said I would have to be hospitalised, but could choose where this would
be. I thought it had better be in Edinburgh, so that my mother could visit me and wouldn’t
have the cost of travelling down to Oxford.
I didn’t tell anyone at Univ apart from
Sid and the College Office and quietly left for Edinburgh the following day, a week or so
before the actual end of the Michaelmas Term on 6 December.
Sid saw me off at Oxford Station. He stood at the window of the second-class compartment
with tears in his eyes and clutched my hand.
I was quite calm and
unemotional. I felt quite brave, though
fated at having to leave Oxford
at the start of my second year with very little achieved, and I wondered if I
would ever return and what would happen as a result of me having this dread
disease. It seemed as if the finger of
my fate, or a guardian angel, was pointing in another direction, taking me away
from Oxford and saying, ‘Not now – not there – not now.’ It was as if something else was planned for
me, another sequence of events. And so
it proved to be. For if I had remained
at Oxford, free
of TB, much that would happen later on would never of course have happened and
I’d have had quite a different life.
In Edinburgh I reported to Liberton
Hospital in Lasswade Road, and feeling like one of the lepers of the original
Leper Town I was put to bed in a TB ward in a building that was situated far
from the clammy mists and smoky fumes of Auld Reekie, and whose open windows
let in the cold fresh air that was supposed to be both healing and
beneficial. There were about ten beds
in the ward, all the others being occupied by men in their 40s or 50s, one of
whom used to masturbate unobtrusively under his blankets when a certain nurse
was in the ward – so my neighbour informed me -- and another who died in the
night. One day his bed, which was
opposite mine, was empty. He had just
disappeared.
What kind of treatment I received I can’t
recall, although soon after I arrived a tube was inserted into my nose and was
forced down inside me into my stomach.
This was exceedingly uncomfortable, even painful, and made me choke and
want to vomit. Tears came to my
eyes. The contents of my stomach were
sucked up so that they might be examined and the exact nature of my
tuberculosis established. X-rays had
revealed that I had pulmonary tuberculosis and there were lesions at the top of
both lungs. Where and how I acquired
the disease was a mystery. It was
thought that I may have picked it up in Hong Kong, where TB was rife among the
Chinese, and that it had lain dormant until exacerbated by the mists, damp and
chill of the Oxford
winter.
Other than that I had to cough up enough
sputum every week to fill a small plastic cup.
This was tested to assess the progress of the disease. I don’t recall taking any pills at this
stage. Bed-rest and fresh air were the
order of each day. But I wasn’t
confined to my bed, being allowed up, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, to go the
toilet and to wander down to the far end of the ward to watch TV on a small
black and white set. And there I
watched the six episodes of a science fiction series, Quatermass and the Pit,
which were transmitted by the BBC every Monday at 8.0 pm, from 22 December to
26 January. It was compulsive viewing,
and its story-line and ideas inflamed and influenced my imagination.
Three Quatermass TV plays were written by
Nigel Kneale, who also wrote The Stone Tape, a highly regarded science fiction/horror
play shown by the BBC in December 1972.
It was based on a theory of residual haunting, since known as the Stone
Tape theory, that images and sounds of past events may be preserved in and by
their physical environment, and transmitted under certain conditions to receptive
minds. In view of the several apparently
supernatural events that have happened to me, I was able to accept this
theory. Some people, some calling
themselves psychics, are I believe susceptible to this phenomenon, as well as
to information and images buried in people’s minds. They
are not in touch with the spirits of the dead. In doing a reading or in describing a
murder scene they never speak of anything that isn’t already known. With highly attuned sensibilities and some
careful and imaginative questioning they pick up information from the person or
persons in the same room as them -- and not from any spirit world.
In Liberton Hospital,
as Christmas approached, the nurses hung some decorations in the ward, and a
former patient appeared with a bottle of whisky. He toured the beds, assuring us we would
soon be as well as he was. I was asked
if I played the piano, and on Christmas Eve, I sat at an old out-of-tune battered
upright in a bleak cold room, and garbed in dressing-gown and pyjamas, as were
other patients who gathered about me, along with some nurses, I thumped out
carols from a hymn-book, while the nurses trilled and the sick ones dolefully coughed
and croaked their way through ‘Hark, the herald angels sing,’ and ‘Oh, come,
all ye faithful.’ It was a singularly
depressing experience – as was the dismal start to the New Year, which loomed
ahead of me filled with nothing, it seemed, but TB.
My mother brought me clean pyjamas, things
to eat and some books – I did a lot of reading as there was nothing else to do,
apart from crosswords and jigsaw puzzles.
My only other visitor was Sid.
In the New Year he travelled up from Swinderby in Lincolnshire where his mother, who had
remarried, was living at the time. While in Edinburgh
he stayed for a few days with my mother at 4 Craiglockhart Road and came to visit me
more than once. He also brought me some
books connected with my studies.
Conversing with him as I lay in bed, propped up on pillows, in a ward of
ill and elderly men, was not conducive to any intimate exchanges. But we talked about Oxford, and Sutherland, and whether it might
be possible to share digs when he moved out of the college later that year and
when I returned.
It wasn’t until after my mother’s death
that I came across a thank-you letter from him, written in Swinderby on 10
January 1959 in his small and neat hand-writing. I wasn’t aware at the time how unctuous he
could be when dealing with elderly women. He had of course met my mother before, after
the Sutherland expedition.
He wrote, ‘Dear Mrs Honeycombe -- This
isn’t a bread and butter letter.
Fortunately I don’t often have to write such things, because my friends
are so kind, and I enjoy staying with them so much that it is a pleasure to
write and say how much I appreciate their kindness. After all, sincere compliments are hard to
come by, and so I think when they are truly deserved they should be sincerely
paid. For all my protests about being
pampered and softened, I must admit I enjoy it, and knowing you I suppose I
shouldn’t expect any less kindness and attention. It was good to feel able to act and talk
easily, forgetting I was a guest, and feeling I belonged there as much as I do
in Swinderby. Thanks a million for all
this.
‘I’m glad we had time to chat, so that I
could hear all about Ron’s life-history.
It was quite fascinating – and amusing … And of course it was wonderful
to see Ron again, and to find him looking so well and so cheerful. I would gladly have travelled much farther
than Edinburgh
to see him, because, as you know, I think a great deal of him, and long to see
him quite fit again. Meeting Marion was very
interesting, as a comparison with Ron …
‘I think Ron will be able to come into the
digs I have next year. The landlady has
asked me to call when I get up to Oxford
to make arrangements, and I think she’ll let us have them. If so, he’ll have all the attention you
think he should. Mrs Shepheard is one
of the best landladies, I’m sure. She
wants £3-15-0 a week each for a double room, which is nearly £1 cheaper than a
single room in this street …
‘Look after yourself, and good luck for
your job. I do hope you will find a
suitable and pleasant one. Bye now –
Love, Sid.’
My mother was evidently looking for a job
to supplement her meagre income, and she did in fact get a job the following
autumn. It didn’t last very long as
she wouldn’t have been very subservient and strait-laced and would have joked
and chatted overmuch with the customers and the staff.
It’s also evident from the above, apart
from the tone of the letter, that everyone assumed that I would miss a year at Oxford, and that when I
returned in October 1959 to restart my second year – when Sid was into his
third – we would share the same digs.
This obviously had to be arranged well in advance, in order to secure
the best accommodation. Mrs Shepheard rented
rooms in a house she owned at 63
St John Street, which was at right angles to Beaumont Street,
where the Playhouse stood.
The OUDS major in the Playhouse in March
1959 was Coriolanus, with Patrick Garland in the leading role and with a set
designed by Sean Kenny and music composed by Dudley Moore, both of whom I would
meet some years later. Both of them
also provided the set and music in the summer for a modern-dress production of
Aristophanes’ The Birds, directed by David Webster and Ken Loach. Among the cast were Jonathan Cecil, Giles
Havergal, Ken Loach, Michael Billington, David Rudkin and Peter Snow. I didn’t of course appear in either of these
productions, nor did I see them, as I had left Liberton
Hospital at the end of January 1959 and
was recuperating in England with
other students, at Pinewood Sanatorium, near Crowthorne in Berkshire.
I
was there for five and a half months.
I travelled to Pinewood by train, the
nearest stations being at Bracknell
and Wokingham. The Sanatorium was
centred on a large mansion, set among pine-trees, with long, low outbuildings
like the Oswestry spiders. Adult male and female patients were segregated
in the main building, and two of the outbuildings housed a couple of wards for
the exclusive use of young students with TB.
This facility had been established so that students would be among other
young persons of roughly the same age and be able to continue their
studies. There were ten beds in Ward 7,
where I was put, and while I was there the other nine beds were occupied for
most of the time by male students from all over England. Two of them hailed originally from India and one from Jordan. Patients came and went. At one time there were 28 students in both
wards. When I left there were only
three of us in Ward 7. TB had been
contained in Britain
and much diminished. The Sanatorium
closed its doors a few years later, in 1961.
In WW2 Pinewood had been used as a
hospital for ill and injured members of the American Air Force. After
the war its use as a TB sanatorium was regularised by the invention in 1946 of
an antibiotic called streptomycin, which greatly reduced the number of people
who over the centuries had died of TB, generally known as consumption. Tuberculosis had been around for millennia,
and even as late as 1950, 50 out of 100,000 people in Britain were
dying from the disease.
Every morning a young, pale nurse called
Grace came into the ward with a trolley on which were the items involved with
the injecting of streptomycin into the buttocks of the young men lying at her
mercy in their beds. My bed was on the
right of the entrance to the ward, and she always started with the first bed on
the left, proceeding down the beds on the left-hand side before dealing with
the beds on the right-hand side. So I
was the last to be injected.
Pretending to read I silently suffered while her inexorable progress
took her all the way around the ward before she parked the trolley beside my
bed, whereupon I pushed back the bedclothes, turned onto my side, exposed my
bottom and awaited the swift jab in my gluteus maximus, after which we were
instructed to massage or rub the afflicted area so that the fluid was dispersed
and didn’t coagulate and cause a lump. Nonetheless, as needles were thicker in those
days, there was a degree of discomfort and some bruising. To lessen both it was the custom to present
a different buttock to be pierced on alternate days.
While I was at Pinewood I was given 166 of
these injections. I kept the 100th
needle as a souvenir.
We were also given pills daily to swallow
– flat white sachets containing something called Pas and Inah – and for a while
I had cortisone injections, administered through the same needle that filled me
with streptomycin. Because of the
cortisone and my general lack of exercise, I put on weight. There is a photo of me, taken out of doors during
the spring or summer that makes me look like Henry VIII. I had grown a beard again and was wearing
the black and gold dressing-gown I’d bought in Hong Kong.
About this time a portrait sketch of me,
bearded and looking intense and aged about 40, was done in black pencil by an
inmate from another ward, Michael Shepley.
He was a film actor who since 1931 had played minor moustachioed character
roles of the bluff military sort. In
March 1937 he had appeared in London in an
unsucessful farce, Bats in the Belfry, which starred Vivien Leigh; and he was
briefly in Dunkirk,
starring John Mills and Richard Attenborough, which was released in September
1958. I expect I asked him about the
films in which he’d appeared – he was the first film actor I’d met. He died three years later, in September
1961, aged 53. Vivien Leigh was also 53
when she died of TB in July 1967.
At Pinewood we weren’t confined to our
beds, being allowed to visit the bathroom and to visit other beds. Meals were taken in bed. When the weather improved and it was warmer,
we were allowed to visit the other young persons’ ward, where there was a communal
lounge and small library. We also went
for leisurely walks in the neighbourhood among the pine trees. The recovery regime was very relaxed. Apart from Grace’s daily visitations and
those of other nurses, our main visitor was Dr McCann, a large, jolly man, who
did a weekly round assessing his patients’ progress.
AD paid an unexpected visit in February,
driving up from Bournemouth. She brought Harold’s sister, Kathleen, with
her, and they stayed overnight at a local hotel. She noted in her Memoirs that it was ‘wet
and stormy.’ She wrote, ‘We reached
the hospital without difficulty and found Gordon sitting up in bed. He was reading a book, and looked pleased
and surprised to see us, as he had not been told of our visit. He was quite cheerful and looked better than
we had expected. He had all the
necessary material required for writing, and his college at Oxford sent any books or information he might
need. He was allowed out of bed to show
us around the library and other nearby rooms, all quite comfortable and
well-furnished. Gordon admitted that
there were times when boredom and frustration set in; he was aware that it
would take six months before he was clear of infection and he had resigned
himself to the inevitable long wait ... and would continue with his studies as
best he could. Gordon had been informed
that his place at University
College would be kept
open for another year and this news had cheered him a lot. Before
leaving the hospital I managed to have a few words with the senior doctor, who
confirmed that both lungs had been infected, but that Gordon was now making
good progress and should be fit in six months’ time and able to lead a normal
life.’
It was in February, on the 11th,
that my sister, Marion, gave birth to another baby girl, who was christened
Felicity Ann Campbell.
Another visitor was an English tutor, a
young man who sat by my bed once a week, while we discussed literary matters
and books he suggested I should read.
Who employed him to come and see me – Pinewood Hospital,
Univ or a local education authority -- I don’t recall. But I remember that he advised me about my
evolving interest in the medieval mystery plays and he brought me books in
which they’d been published. My interest
had been fired by what Peter Bayley had said in his final adjudication at
Cuppers --- and also in tutorials – about the dramatic and unexploited
potential of these plays, which had once been performed by medieval guilds. Two versions of the Crucifixion had been
presented at Cuppers, and the Wadham version, which I saw, had come first.
In the College Library I had looked at
books containing the miracle plays as performed by the guilds in several Midland towns and wondered if they could be staged as
written. At Pinewood the idea came to
me that I might put together a composite play, made up of scenes and extracts
from five of the more complete cycles of the medieval English mystery or
miracle plays, from those of York, Towneley, Chester, Coventry
and the Ludus Coventriae. And it
happened that my months at Pinewood gave me the time to do so.
The quality, content and language of the
plays varied a great deal. Originally I
thought of beginning the adaptation, as the cycles began, with the
Creation. But the Old and New Testament
material would have lasted too long; the large amount of doctrinal teaching
would have been undramatic and dull; and the medieval representations of God,
Adam and Eve and Lucifer quaint and unconvincing, like characters in a
pantomime. So I began the adaptation
with the Annunciation, and with the Angel’s sudden appearance above the stage
and his resounding greeting, ‘Hail, Mary!’
When I began modernising, when necessary,
the medieval verses, I sought, while retaining the flavour of the original
cycles -- their vigour, humour and vulgarity -- to make their language
intelligible. To this end,
incomprehensible rhymes were altered to an understandable assonance, obscure
Middle English words and phrases were expunged or updated, as was the grammar
of some sentences. The language of the
Middle Ages was still unformed when the mystery plays were written down and was
as irregular as the dialects that shaped the rhythms of common speech.
I called my adaptation The Miracles rather
than The Mysteries, as it only covered the New Testament and the life of
Christ. When I left Pinewood I was
still working on the various versions of the plays, knitting them together and
determining whether to translate some words and whether the verse had always to
scan and even rhyme. I was tempted to
write my own versified version of the plays, but decided to let them speak for
themselves. Whether OUDS or ETC would
stage the play was open to doubt, as there were over 60 characters, as well as
a crowd. It seemed inconceivable that
Univ Players would be able to take it on.
In the bed on my left, on the other side
of the entrance to the ward was a thin-faced, black-haired northerner, Terry
Cudden, from an iron and steel town, Consett in County Durham. Being a Catholic and a schoolteacher he took
an interest in what I was doing. But it
wasn’t until ten years later that he wrote to me at ITN, inquiring as to what
had happened to my adaptation and whether it had ever been staged. This led in 1970 to what was the most
authentic and most successful production of The Miracles, which was staged as
The Redemption in Consett, with a large cast of local people, most of whom had
never acted before.
Being at Pinewood was almost like being on
holiday, with all meals provided, and congenial company if required, and there
was time to do whatever you felt like in the way of reading and writing and
going for walks. Apart from the daily injections,
TB was not an unpleasant illness to have.
In March I was visited by Sid, who
hitch-hiked over from Oxford. We
went for a stroll among the pine trees. I was now allowed to ramble about outside the
ward, and even further afield. A letter
card to my mother, written on 29 April, reveals that she was sending me Edinburgh newspapers and
occasionally some money, probably postal orders or one pound notes. She was also doing some of my washing. I wrote, ‘Yesterday I posted my dirty
pyjamas back to you. I did this myself
in the village PO outside the hospital as I now have 3 hours, and am allowed to
get dressed officially, but not – officially – to go out. Very fine weather. So I’ll be exercising every afternoon, if
it’s dry … I need some coat-hangers and you could send down now my thin
scarves, cravats, and some Lifebuoy soap.
That’s all I need at the moment.’
Soon after this she visited me, and
although I suggested she make the most of her journey into England by taking a coach from Reading
to Bournemouth and staying with AD, I don’t
remember that she did. My next letter
to her that has survived is dated 29 June.
‘Dear Mum – All letters and parcels
received, and PCs, also letter from Marion. I’m still in Ward 7. I was given the chance to move over to Ward 6,
but as there are only 3 of us in 7, and Ward 6 has a full house, life would be
more peaceful and organised if I stayed where I was. So I’m not moving from here until I
leave. There’s a general exodus of
students at the moment: 2 last week; 3 next week. By the end of the month, if no more patients
come in, there will only be about 3 students left. The highest number at one time was 28. Anyway, I’ve had my last X-ray here; that
was last week; and McCann says I can go in 3 weeks. So I’ll probably leave about July 21st. But I’ll let you know for certain later on.’
I continued, ‘This week, also, I’ll know
whether or not the BBC in London
will take me. If they do I’ll arrange
for it to be in August, and you needn’t worry about digs as I should be able to
lodge with the tutor or some friends of the students here. I was up in London last Friday for a short
interview with the BBC – had lunch and saw a film with a girl from Oxford, and
this was more expensive than I bargained for – so I need some money, but not
much.’
The tutor must have been the one who
visited me in Pinewood, and the girl was probably Joan Newman, who lived in
south-east London
with her parents and her brother John.
It seems that after my three months with the Scottish Home Service the
previous summer I had applied for a similar vacation job with BBC Radio’s HQ at
Broadcasting House in London. If I got it (I didn’t) a career in
broadcasting might have resulted – I had a BBC-sounding voice – and I might
have become a full-time continuity announcer or a reader of the radio
news.
By this time I was clearly allowed to
travel, by bus or train, although still based at Pinewood, for I refer to a
trip to Oxford,
presumably to see Sid, made about the middle of June.
I
wrote, ‘When I was in Oxford
last – that was at the end of term – I cashed £5 from my banking account
there. Saw the digs for next year which
Sid had fixed up and though they’re small compared with college rooms, they’re
well-equipped with furniture and handy for the town and 5 minutes from
College. I’ll probably see him if I go
up to Henley with some of the students from here, as the College Four and Eight
are rowing in the Regatta … Weather has been broken by thunderstorms, but it’s
sunshine every day nevertheless. Hay
fever has now gone – this being the end of June. I’m beardless as well, as having seen some
recent photos of myself taken at Pinewood I decided I didn’t like what I saw … Love,
Ronald.’
I wrote again on 9 July, a week before I left
Pinewood, pleased to be leaving but uncertain about what I would be doing, and
where, before returning to Univ in October.
‘You’ll be relieved to know I didn’t get
the BBC job in London,
but I’m still prospecting for something to do during the summer months. I’m not going to sit around for 2 months and
spend money. Anyway the immediate
programme is that I leave here on the 16th or 17th –
depending on transport to Wokingham Station, and then will travel to Oxford,
where I’ll get my half of the digs in order, and see to various things that
need seeing to in Oxford.’
I
told her I had ‘hitch-hiked over to Henley one
day, for the Regatta there, with another chap, and saw Sid and the College row
and lose. Brilliant day and a great
social occasion. We’ve had continuously
hot weather, as you will have read, and today it broke in a heavy
thunderstorm. Now it’s grey and
cool. I’ve been up to London
twice and Oxford
once to see various girls, and combined business with pleasure on all occasions. Tomorrow I’m going up to London with some of the Unit to see the
sights. We have a Frenchman here on
exchange from a Paris
sanatorium, and he wants to see around – some of the others are making a
daylong outing out of it. Probably a
boat trip down the Thames will be the best way
of sightseeing. I’ll maybe have the
Frenchman over for the day at Oxford, while I’m
there – he’s already asked me over to France, but I won’t go there this
year.’
Apart from Joan Newman, I can’t think who
the ‘various girls’ might have been, unless they were some of those from LMH,
like Meg Rothwell, Janet Mathew and Janet Lister, the last two being squired at
Oxford by Mike Fletcher and Sid. The
Frenchman was Yves Wendels. We had met
through the occupational therapy classes that students were invited to
attend. One class involved making soft
toys, and Yves and I became adept at making small, sitting bears like grey koalas
with black noses and button eyes. One I
gave to Sid.
I left Pinewood Sanatorium on Thursday, 16
July 1959, with no regrets, and travelled by train to Oxford,
and thence for a few days to Edinburgh. Later on, I learned that because I had
contracted TB, I had been officially discharged from the Army – which meant
that I didn’t have to do any Army training as a Territorial. That was a relief.
I told my mother, on Sunday, 19 July, ‘I’m
not at the moment staying in our proper digs, as the previous occupants haven’t
moved out yet. Sid is ensconced there
in a different room from the one he’ll have next term, and I’m in a Bed and
Breakfast place down the road. He’s
washing glasses at the Randolph Hotel, which takes up odd hours of the day, and
of course he’s studying, so I’ve been rather on the loose, but meet up with
others from College who are still up.’
Among them was Mary Porter, who had walked
on with me as a neighbour in the Univ production of The Strangest Kind of
Romance at Cuppers in November the previous year. She had a vacation job with an establishment
that provided courses in English for foreign students from a dozen West
European countries. Founded in 1953 as
the Oxford English Centre for Foreign Students, it became known as St Clare’s
and was based in a large mansion in Banbury
Road.
Within a few years St Clare’s expanded to allow more teaching space and
a wider choice of subject choices, and home-stay arrangements were largely
replaced by residential accommodation.
During the summer it employed and paid undergraduates to act as
tour-guides and hosts on a series of summer courses that lasted for three
weeks. Because someone backed out, I
was employed to supervise such a course at the end of August.
It surprises me that I remember very
little about all this and very little indeed about the events of 1959, most of
which I’ve only been able to recall because of my letters to my mother and some
photos. Thanks to a typed Programme of
Social Activities for a Vacation Course at St Clare’s from 22 August to 12
September 1959 – a copy of which I sent to her -- I can say with some authority
that these activities included an evening stroll to a river pub, the Perch, and
later on a walk to the Trout ‘an old pub with a lovely garden.’ Afternoons were spent punting and swimming
(not by me), and on visits to colleges, to the Telephone Exchange, to the
historic Tudor house at Compton Wynyates, and in the evening to the Playhouse
to see The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, an ‘important play of the Australian
contemporary theatre, seats 4/6.’ Later
we saw a Double Bill of plays by Bernard Shaw.
The students were charged for each event and were transported hither and
thither by coach. Some I became
friendly with, but I can’t remember their names. On Saturday, the 29th, there was
a trip (15/6) to London, which included a ticket to see A Midsummer Night’s
Dream at the Regent’s Park Open-air Theatre.
I told my mother, ‘The London trip was
probably the most worrying, as I had to ensure that all 15 of us got across London. We went downriver in a boat to the Tower,
looked around Westminster, had lunch and supper
in Lyons.’ The coach taking us back to Oxford
left the Victoria
coach station at 11.0 pm.
On the Sunday there was a steamer trip to
Abingdon. There were visits to the
Oxford Town Hall, to a steelworks, to Windsor Castle and Eton College, to
Cambridge, and to Salisbury, Wilton House and Stonehenge – none of which I had
ever seen before. There was a poetry
and Shakespeare reading, in which I took part.
There were parties and dances.
Some trips and events were cancelled for lack of support – about half of
the students had been on previous courses and had previously visited some of
the tourist destinations themselves.
It
all sounds rather strenuous, interesting and fun. But I remember absolutely nothing of any of
this and next to nothing about the students.
On Tuesday, 1 September I told my mother
that I went to work every morning at St Clare’s, where the students gathered
for their lessons, and that I had my lunch there. Afternoons and evenings, I said, were spent
on various excursions and parties – ‘Did a poetry reading last night.’ I told her that Sid was away picking hops in
Kent,
and I was getting used to living in 63
St John Street.
‘The house is rather antiquated,’ I wrote, ‘Jug and basin for washing in
bedrooms.’
At the end of the course I went down to Bournemouth to stay with AD in her small flat in
Hurlingham House in Manor Road. I arrived there on the 12th and
wrote to my mother two days later. ‘I’m
glad you have a job,’ I said. ‘You’ll
have to learn a sales manner and not be too chatty with the customers.’ She had at last obtained some employment, as
a sales-lady in Jenners, a big store in Princes Street.
On 19 September, AD and I
entrained for London, where I stayed with a
friend, whose identity I’ve forgotten, and attended a 21st birthday
party in St Albans. Again, I remember nothing at all about
this. Nor about staying for a few days
with Sid in his mother’s home in Swinderby -- except that I suffered from
excesses of vertigo when we visited Lincoln Cathedral and ascended by perilous
means to the top of the central tower.
He was not at all sympathetic.
My life began to become more memorable
when he and I returned to Oxford
on 3 October before the start of the Michaelmas Term of 1959 and when I began
my second year anew. I was now 23. The
last ten months seemed to have been a total waste of time, a deflection from
the main stream of my life. But I had
written The Miracles – and a set of circumstances that arose out of this when I
returned to Oxford
would greatly influence what happened next.
10. OXFORD and THE MIRACLES,
1959-60
The digs we shared at 63 St John Street couldn’t have been much
better. We were both there for two years, for
although Sid was now a year in advance of me, he stayed on at Oxford to work on a B.Litt while I was in my
third year, which ended with my final exams for a BA.
A week after we moved in together I
described the digs, with diagrams, in a letter to my mother, after asking her
to send me a hot-water bottle and acknowledging that I’d received a pair of
slippers and a food parcel. I informed
her that I’d be having a medical check-up the following week.
I said, ‘The digs as you know are
centrally placed, practically at the corner of Beaumont Street and St John Street. You come in the front door, turn right, go
upstairs to the first landing where one way takes you to the bathroom and the
other to our sitting-room (which overlooks St John St) and to Sid’s bedroom,
which is below mine on the second floor.
We have breakfast in the basement beside the kitchen. It’s all very clean … My bedroom overlooks
the backyard and beyond it I can see part of Worcester College. The room’s fairly crowded, with plenty of
places to put things, and my feet are almost out of the window. Jug and basin washing, and a large, almost
double, bed. There are also two chairs. The sitting-room is much admired by others
living in digs who have seen it. White
walls, and the sofa, etc, and curtains are in various shades and mixtures of
pink and rust. Again, plenty of
furniture. I bought an electric ring so
that we might make our own tea/coffee without going down to the kitchen. There
are two small tables and two armchairs.
We’ve hung the room with our own pictures, ornaments, etc, and when the
electric fire is on it gets very warm, being fairly small.’
Our landlady, Mrs Shepheard, who was a
thin, grey-haired, softly spoken lady with glasses, lived on the ground floor
and in the basement. The breakfasts she
made us were ample, and when we were out she cleaned our rooms and may even
have made our beds. I don’t remember
making mine.
On 27 October I was writing to my mother
again, telling her that my visit to the Chest Clinic for a check-up had proved
to be satisfactory, and that I’d be going back for another check-up before the
end of term. I also told her I was in a
play, part of double-bill being presented by ETC at the Playhouse from 16
November.
I said, ‘The play is a short one by
Ionesco. All very modern and we act
like puppets. This will be staged for
one week, and we’re rehearsing now, but not very energetically – although the
puppet business is strenuous enough.
Apart from that I’m working.’ I
told her I’d had a bad cold ‘which I gave to everyone else, but it’s all right
now.’ I added that I was now the
Academical representative at Oxford
– the one before me having been sent down.
I said that I’d been meeting the new arrivals from Edinburgh and looking up the old ones. Bill Nicoll was the Academicals’ Cambridge representative,
and we invited each other to our annual dinners in the Hilary Term.
The Ionesco play was Jacques and it was directed
by John Duncan. He was now in his
second year, like me, and whether I auditioned or whether he asked me to take
part I don’t recall. More likely the
latter. But besides me he had, as
Jacques, Richard Hampton, who was also at Univ, in his second year, and also
reading English. Richard had acted with
the National Youth Theatre, which had been founded by Michael Croft in 1956,
and though a small man had a big voice and a cheery personality.
I felt comfortable with Duncan as a director. He
usually stood when he was directing, near the actors, script in hand, sometimes
with a cigarette in the other hand, wearing a stained and shabby long black
coat and pushing his lank hair off his face.
He never raised his voice or was nasty, and I for one was happy to try
and do what he suggested in whatever way he wanted. By now he had built on his reputation. The previous summer he had, with Eddie
Gilbert, produced Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness for Univ
Players in the gardens of LMH. It was
highly praised.
In a letter to my mother written on
Wednesday, 11 November, in which I thanked her for sending two parcels, some
ten shilling notes and several letters, and asked her to stop spending the
extra money she was earning at Jenners on me and send no more parcels
containing items like tea, butter and cheese.
I told her, ‘We’ve just been rehearsing in the Playhouse. Once through on the proper stage. The play only takes about an hour – it’s
part of a Double Bill, and the first night is this coming Monday. We’re playing all week, with a matinee on
Saturday.’ The second part of the
Double Bill was the melodrama that launched Sir Henry Irving’s career in 1871 –
The Bells.
I also told my mother, ‘Last weekend, on
Friday/Saturday, Sid and I went up to Stratford
with a college outing by bus to see Coriolanus. We stayed the night with some friends of his
then saw All’s Well that Ends Well the following day, returning to Oxford that
night with two friends from college who had come over by car.’ That was on 6/7 November.
I remember nothing of this. But in view of future events it’s worth
noting that Coriolanus was directed by Peter Hall and that Vanessa Redgrave,
Albert Finney, Ian Holm and Paul Hardwick were in the cast. Edith Evans played Volumnia and Laurence
Olivier was a much-praised Coriolanus.
I believe we saw Olivier’s understudy, Albert Finney, in the name part. That winter Olivier, playing Archie Rice,
was in Morecambe filming The Entertainer, which was directed by Tony Richardson
and released in July 1960. Finney made
his first appearance in a film as Olivier’s son, Mick Rice, before starring in
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Tony Richardson would marry Vanessa in April
1962 and later that year direct Finney, Susannah York and David Warner in the
joyously funny, Oscar-winning film of Tom Jones.
The first night of Jacques and The Bells
was on Monday, 16 November 1959. It was
the first time I had acted in a real theatre and it was a nightly thrill,
waiting for the curtains to part and then to step onto the brightly lit
stage. Future productions of the Oxford
Playhouse Company were The Relapse, with Robert Eddison, Dinsdale Landen and
Jennifer Daniel, and Through the Looking Glass, with Jane Asher as Alice. John Duncan had all the cast, except for
Jacques, performing like puppets without strings, with jerky, angular
movements. Eight of us, the families of
Jacques and his girl-friend, Roberta, all had hideous pig-like masks. Being
disguised with a mask helped me give a strong performance. I was
Roberta’s father and wore plus-fours.
The reviewers thought The Bells failed to
pass the test of time. The
Times
said it wasn’t a good enough play, even as a period piece, and induced an
excess of irreverent laughter in the audience.
The Times Educational Supplement said that without Henry Irving it was a
non-starter. They all liked Jacques,
which was being given its first public performance in the UK.
The Times said, ‘One would be very rash to
claim to understand all the symbolism of the piece. But its message – the tragedy ever-present
in the trivialities of daily routine – is made clear by Mr John Duncan’s
professionally brisk production. All
but Mr Richard Hampton, who makes an admirable Jacques, are grotesquely
masked. Even so, Miss Wendy Varnals as
Jacques’s fiancée with three noses is most engaging, and from the others there
is some brilliant miming.’ The Daily
Telegraph said, ‘Jacques is a young man with hating instead of loving
parents. His mother remarks, “Didn’t I
always rub your knees with nettles when you wanted stinging?” When a bride is found for him she is
inevitably ugly, with two noses. But
for Jacques she isn’t ugly enough. He is
not even content with her sister, who has three noses, and only when she begins
to discourse lovingly on such unpalatable subjects as cancer does he respond
with accounts of similar horrors.’ Isis said the play was ‘a grisly satire’ about ‘the whole
ghastly ritual of Marrying Off the Only Son’ and once Jacques was left alone
with his fiancée the reluctant Jacques’s sanctuary of reasonableness was
invaded by instinct. ‘They act out a
horrible sexual metaphor that should drive anyone retching into celibacy,’
after which the families performed ‘a tribal dance around the happy couple,
grunting, barking and howling.’ The
Times Educational Supplement commented on the culminating ‘horrible scene where
the rest of the family snuffle round the engaged couple like dogs around a
lamp-post: automata all of them – mere things.’ The Stage said, ‘Richard Hampton plays
Jacques with ease and attack, and
amongst the sub-human marionettes Ronnie de Sousa as Jacques’s father, Wendy
Varnals as his grotesque affianced, and Gordon Honeycombe as her ghoulish
father are particularly notable.’ We
four were also praised by the Oxford Times.
Never before had I appeared in a play that was hailed in local and
national papers as a success and be singled out for praise. I was pleased and proud.
It was not until 10 days later that I
wrote to my mother again, on 26 November.
I said, ‘Sorry I’ve been so long in answering, but I had the play all
last week and I’ve had 2 essays to write since then. However, all has been cleared, and enclosed
are all the crits so far published about the double-bill. The play occupied most of the time that was
spare last week, so I’ve not been doing anything else. But last night went to a verse-reading given
by Edith Evans, and have started organising a production which Duncan (who
produced ‘Jacques’) and I will produce next term for the college. We’re holding auditions for that this week,
and at the moment I’m working on the script with 2 other fellows from college.’
I remember nothing, alas, about the
reading given by Edith Evans, who presumably came over to Oxford
from Stratford,
where the Shakespeare season had ended.
But it’s evident from this letter that I must have discussed The
Miracles with the Univ Players committee and that they liked the idea of
staging it in the Hilary Term. Duncan also clearly liked
the idea, as the play had a big cast, as well as interesting production values
and possibilities. In particular he
liked the idea of the whole college being involved, as the medieval guilds had
been. Peter Bayley would also have
taken an interest and encouraged this very ambitious venture.
Although Duncan and I were billed in the
programme – he first – as co-producers, I did all the groundwork in finding a
venue, in designing a poster and the programme, in choosing the music and
co-opting Bill Tydeman and Keith Miles to assist in assembling and translating,
where necessary, a finished and playable version of The Miracles. Duncan
also had a hand in editing some of the material. In the end the finished version contained
eight plays, from the Annunciation to the Resurrection, with an interval after
the Entry into Jerusalem. Some sections were very effectively played without
words, in total silence – Duncan’s
idea -- like the Adoration of the Three Kings, the Raising of Lazarus and
everything that occurred after Jesus died until he appeared on the rood screen
of Pusey House Chapel for his final speech to the crowd below.
Keith Miles was a freshman historian, four
years younger than me, who had done some acting at his school in South Wales and had ambitions to be a writer. He became a script-writer for The Archers
and Crossroads and ultimately wrote several plays and more than 60 novels,
mainly murder mysteries. He was a
quiet, nice-looking, self-contained person and I never got to know him.
College notices about the auditions
stressed the communal enterprise of the production. I was keen, as was Duncan, that every aspect of student life
should be represented – scholars, commoners, rowers, rugby players, members of
the various societies and academics, apart from the known actors of Univ
Players. Agnostics, atheists,
Anglicans, Catholics, Jews and Buddhists all took part, and the three Kings
were played by Univ students from Pakistan,
Thailand and Japan. I didn’t want any of the parts to be
doubled, and as there were over 60 speaking parts, plus a crowd, up to 90
performers were required. What
appealed to some was that they would only appear in one or two scenes, so
rehearsals would not be too time-consuming and only in the week of performance
would they be needed every day.
Some who were in their third year, like
Peter Wells, were advised by their tutors not to take part. In fact no undergraduate could take part
unless he had his tutor’s permission.
Some Duncan or I approached personally.
Nonetheless about 60 students actually turned up to the auditions, which
were held in a lecture room, and everyone was promised a part – nearly
everyone. For Sid, who didn’t have a big enough voice or
presence for the Angel and was too tall to be a Shepherd, was rejected – by
me. He might have been a King, or
Lazarus, but was too tall and fit for the latter and not oriental enough in
appearance for the former. Ironically,
my height would also prove to be a drawback as an actor a few years later. Instead of Sid being one of the cast he became
the Master of the Wardrobe, a task which he very capably accomplished with the
help of some LMH girls in a dank cellar at Univ. Other girls and girl-friends from LMH and
other colleges filled out the female roles.
Finding Jesus was a problem as there was
no one who had dark hair, looked Jewish, had a commanding presence and voice
and was fit enough to carry the cross and hang on it for ten minutes in the
emotionally and physically exhausting penultimate scene. Peter Stone had a good voice, was
dark-haired and had a splendidly beaky nose.
But he was deemed to be too small.
In the end Peter played Judas, and our very unJewish Jesus had short
fair hair, was blue-eyed, good-looking and athletic.
Syd Norris was a scholar and a classicist
studying Mods and Greats. He had been at
the Liverpool Institute High School
for Boys, where he had been Head Boy.
During his National Service he was in the Intelligence Corps. He was also a cross-country runner and a
committed Christian. Apart from his
looks he was ideal. Duncan had seen him intervene in a JCR debate
on a motion critical of the South African policy of apartheid and was impressed
by Syd’s strong presence and voice. But
when approached to play Jesus in The Miracles he had a problem. He was in his second year and the Mods exams
took place soon after the production. He
had to get his tutor’s permission.
Many years later he told me, ‘When I
raised the subject with Freddie Wells, he said he would not object to this
particular part, though he might take a different view if, for example, it was
Hamlet. I told him I found it difficult
to decide whether to participate, since I had worked hard in the hope of a
First, and did not want to jeopardise my chances. He said in his disarming way, “But a Second
is a very good degree.” ’ Syd continued,
‘Having recently been confirmed as an Anglican, I regarded participating in the
play as to some degree an act of worship … In much of the play it was
essentially a matter of speaking the words well and feeling the part … But
inevitably a choice of interpretation had to be made in several places, especially
in the words from the cross … “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” can
be taken as a cry of utmost agony, desolation and alienation, the ultimate of
suffering, or as a calm meditation on the words of the 22nd
Psalm. We went for the first, followed
by what I hope was relief, exhilaration and resumed confidence in the words
“Now is my passion at an end …” ’
In the production he spoke those last
words, having hung in darkness before making that terrible cry believing that
God had abandoned him, as a light slowly shone down on him from above. The
light then slowly faded as he died. He
was taken down from the cross in total silence and semi-darkness and his body
carried into the tomb. The silence was
maintained as Mary Magdalene and the other two Marys came to the tomb and saw
the Angel and realised that Jesus’ body wasn’t there. They rushed offstage to spread the word and
the whole cast now assembled silently on the stage carrying lit tapers,
whereupon the risen Christ suddenly appeared above them (on the rood screen) in
a blaze of light. The cast all knelt, having extinguished their
tapers, and at the end of Christ’s final exhortation they rose to their feet,
shouting ‘Te Deum laudamus!’ and the whole stage filled with light. And then they silently drifted away, until
the stage was empty and dark, with only the light on the figure of Christ, his
arms held wide as if embracing the audience.
The light then faded on him and the house-lights came on. There was never any applause. People
were very moved by the production; some cried.
I was told that one night a
little girl in the front row was in tears throughout the crucifixion.
Syd and all the other men in the cast were
asked not to shave during the Christmas holiday, so that with beards, etc, they
would have a medieval look. Some found
beard-growing a difficult task. The
best beard was grown by Herod (John Henderson). It was agreed that I, as Peter, would lead
the disciples and direct the good characters, like the Angel, Mary, Joseph,
Jesus, the Shepherds and the Kings, while Duncan
led and directed the crowd and all the bad characters, like Herod, Caiaphas,
the Jews, and the Torturers, who were all given, at my suggestion, something
red to wear. In effect I would direct
the early scenes of The Miracles and Duncan the later ones. I concentrated on individual performances
while he concerned himself mainly with the crowd scenes, and with the medieval
concept of the play.
Eventually we acquired a cast of over 80
people, and all the aspects of the production, like lighting, staging,
promotion, costume-making, the music and the making of the cross were
initiated. The music was arranged by
Gordon Crosse from what could be found in medieval manuscripts and when not
pre-recorded was sung by the company.
And then, having launched the production, I set out on another journey, to
the far south-west, to Cornwall,
on a quest to find out whether there was really a place called Honeycombe Hall,
and whether Honeycombes had ever lived there, and whether they, and I, were
descended from a Norman knight.
In a
letter to my mother, written on Tuesday, 8 December, I said that Sid had
received a Christmas card from her, for which he thanked her, and that it was
now on the mantel-piece.
I continued, ‘On Thursday, he and I and an
American from Magdalen, who has a car, are setting off for Honeycombe
Hall. We’ll stop at Bristol for the first night, then continue
west the next day. We’ll be back in Oxford on Monday; and I’ll be travelling back up to Edinburgh on
Wednesday. That’s the 16th. We’ve not planned the Cornwall trip in
detail as we don’t know how long we’ll be staying in each area to look up
parish registers, but we’ll be staying the nights in inns on the way … Will be
returning to Oxford on January 1st.
This is because “Jacques” has been entered for a Drama Festival in Oxford and is scheduled
for the first night of the Drama Week – Jan 4th … Today I’m just
attending to domestic matters like laundry and letters. We have breakfast here in the digs, but
since there are no meals available for us now in college … we have lunch and
supper in some Cafeteria or Milk Bar.
There’s a new place that has opened recently called the Clarendon … We
go there for most meals. Tea we usually
have in the digs, or if Sid is working in the Library all afternoon I go and
visit someone about teatime and stay for tea.
Laundry, of course, I take to a valet service near the college.’
The American, Verne Caviness, was a friend
of Sid. Intrigued by my tales of the
supposed ancient and noble origins of the Honeycombes and by the finding on a
very detailed map of Cornwall of a house called Honicombe, near a village
called Calstock, he suggested that we drive there and have a look at the house
and any parish registers that might be in Calstock Church, to see what, if any,
reality there was in the legend of the Honeycombes.
So on Thursday, 10 December, we set out,
at a leisurely pace, for Cornwall. Verne Caviness had a small second-hand car
and he must have been a careful driver or, more than likely, we stopped en
route at some places of historic interest, like the huge stone circle at
Avebury, and the city of Bath. We found somewhere to lodge in Bristol
overnight, and then headed southwest, again probably diverting to view Wells
Cathedral and Glastonbury, before making for Taunton, Exeter and around the
northern edge of Dartmoor to Tavistock.
It was dark by the time we crossed the old and narrow stone bridge over
the River Tamar that took us from Devon into Cornwall, where I had never been and would revisit
many times in years to come.
We followed the A390 that led on to
Callington and Liskeard, looking for somewhere to stay, and came across an
old-fashioned roadside inn, the Rifle Volunteer, where there was accommodation
and a meal and local beer. Honeycombe,
we were told, was a mile or so south of where we were – the house was derelict
and up for sale. Its last owner had
been an Indian doctor. Although I was eager to try to find it that
night, the others pointed out that in the dark of narrow Cornish roads the
house would be difficult to find.
Besides, we’d see more of it and my ancestral lands by the light of day. So we went upstairs to sleep in three separate
rooms on the second floor.
My room had a high arched ceiling, and in
its apex, opposite my double bed was a circular window, only visible when the
lights were off as a paler shade of black.
I awoke in the middle of the night, terror-struck, as I had been in St Andrews. I
knew that at the foot of the bed was a figure darker than the darkness in the
room. I couldn’t move, in case it
moved, in case it fell on me and destroyed me. Paralysed by fear I lay for what seemed like
an eternity but was probably just a few minutes. Then, inch by terrified inch, I edged my
right hand and arm towards the bedside table and the lamp, reached it,
convulsively switched it on and flooded the room with light. No one and nothing stood at the foot of my
bed. Much shaken and shaking I
staggered in my pyjamas out of the room, entered Sid’s bedroom and incoherently
mumbling about a bad dream asked him to move in with me. He did so and was soon asleep on my right. For a time I lay awake, still fearful and peering
into the darkness. For a few mad
moments I imagined that the thing now lay beside me, but I knew that the figure
beside me was that of Sid – I could hear him breathing, and he was real.
In the morning a woman came into the room,
now lit by early daylight from the circular window, with a cup of tea, which
she put on the bedside table. I said
nothing, now embarrassed by the body beside me, and neither did she. She went away, and I wondered if we would be
arrested or get some strange looks when we went downstairs for breakfast. We didn’t, although my account of my fearful
experience was greeted by the other two with disbelieving looks and the verdict
that I must have had a nightmare. But
when I dreamed I never had nightmares as such, although nightmarish things,
like being chased by lions or dinosaurs occasionally occurred. And I was always able to end anything
frightening by waking myself up.
Recurring themes when I was older were the Royal Family, journeys by
train or bus, cities, coastal landscapes, high hills and the sea. Once I was in a space-ship and once on
another planet.
The
Rifle Volunteer was renovated many years later -- for a time it had been closed
– and one night I was having dinner in the restaurant. After the meal, I told the woman behind the
bar about my night-terror in the room with the circular window. “Oh, yes, it’s haunted,” she said, but she
didn’t know why or by what. Other
guests had apparently complained of sleepless or disturbed nights there. She mentioned that in the smaller bar near
us, which had been the original bar of the old inn, a female figure had been
seen more than once by the fireplace.
Some had seen a man.
I would see and hear other things in other
places, in a fire-station, in someone’s home, and most memorably in an inn in
Shropshire and a farmhouse in Western
Australia.
But those are other stories.
On the cold, grey winter’s morning of
Saturday, 12 December, after following spoken directions – there were no
guiding signposts then – we found Honeycombe House at the end of a private,
overgrown and wooded driveway. I
recognised it at once from a photo that had been taken when Aunt Donny and
Harold visited that part of Cornwall
in 1938. It was a plain two-storey
Victorian mansion with a square tower that had been built beside and behind a
hall, which had two ground-floor Elizabethan mullioned windows, decorated by a
Victorian owner with symbols of playing-cards, hearts, clubs, diamonds and
spades. We forced a door, went in, and
looked around the empty, damp and decaying rooms downstairs. There was the blackened stain of a fire
under one of the stairs. Outside, the
once ornamental garden, with a pedestal-and-bowl stone fountain, a shrubbery
and a monkey puzzle tree, were ragged and unkempt. A stream that presumably ran down to the Tamar River
was buried in the undergrowth. The whole
place spoke of loss and decay. It was dispiriting. But at least there really was a Honeycombe
House.
Who had lived here, and when? In time I learned that the last Honeycombes who
had lived there had done so in the first half of the fourteenth century and
that they had taken their name from the house or hall, which in turn took its
name from the valley, the Honeyed Vale or Combe, above which it stood. Some years later I saw the hall when it was
being restored and it was clearly very old, the walls of the hall being three
feet thick. In 1959, if I’d had the
money, I could have bought the house and its 32 acres for £4,000. These days, as the Honicombe Manor
Holiday Village,
with its swimming-pool, tennis courts, and 70 or so chalets and lodges, it’s
now worth at least £40 million.
We drove on to the parish church, high on
a hill above the village of Calstock and the River Tamar, and here the Rector
of St Andrew’s, Canon Gordon Ruming, bespectacled and slightly prissy, retrieved
the parish registers from a safe (they’re now kept in the County Record Office
in Truro) and showed them to us. Some
of the earlier registers, going back to 1580 or so, were missing. But on the first page of the first register which
I looked at was a Honicombe, a Mark Honicombe, who married Katherine Saunders
in 1634. And other Honeycombes -- the
spelling varied – were in the registers of burials and births. Canon Ruming then produced a rolled up parchment, a church
seating plan showing all the villagers who attended services in the church (and
paid from two pence to two shillings for their place in a pew) in about
1587. Among them were 12 Honeycombes,
who had trekked up the hill from the village
of Calstock and
worshipped in the church where I was now.
It was a wonder.
But was I a descendant of some of these
Cornish Honeycombes? Was Roy Honeycombe
in Jersey?
Had one of them or either of us ever had as an ancestor a Norman knight?
The parish registers of births and burials
also contained the names of other Honeycombes. It was obvious to me that I would have to
return some day and start noting down all the references to Honeycombes in
these registers and in other registers – a task that would take me many years,
some 40 years in all. In the end I
realised that all the disconnected family trees I was able to assemble weren’t
disconnected at all, and that all the Honeycombes in the world today were
actually descended from one man, Matthew Honeycombe, who lived in the Cornish village of St Cleer and died there in 1728. His ancestors had come from Calstock, and I
was able eventually, through Assession Rolls and Court Rolls and other ancient
documents, to trace them back to Honeycombe itself, where a John de Honyacombe
was living in 1326.
There was no time that weekend in Cornwall to do anything
else other than tour the area, visiting other churches, in Callington, Liskeard
and St Cleer, in whose registers were other Honeycombe names. We didn’t return to the Rifle Volunteer,
lodging somewhere else on the Saturday night, and drove back to London on the Sunday, probably via Stonehenge.
I wrote to my mother on the Tuesday, 15
December. I said, ‘Arrived back in Oxford on Sunday night, but I won’t be coming up to Edinburgh till Thursday
now, as I’ve got some work to do concerning the production next term. If there are two trains from Oxford to Edinburgh via Birmingham I’ll be
getting the later one – to arrive at Princes
Street.’
In the event I got the 8.48 am from Oxford
and reached Edinburgh
at 5.47 pm.
I returned to Oxford on 1 January 1960, two weeks before
the Hilary Term began, to re-rehearse Jacques for its presentation at the NUS
Drama Festival, on Monday, 4 January.
Jacques was performed at the Playhouse on
the first night of the Festival as part of a double bill with Arnold Wesker’s
The Kitchen, staged by the Cambridge University Mummers. I don’t recall attending any of the morning
talks given by guest speakers like Arnold Wesker, John Neville and Sir Ralph
Richardson. Of the many actors in the
13 productions on display none ever made a success of an acting career in later
years, although Terry Hands and Derek Goldby were to become successful stage
directors and Tony Garnett a BBC producer.
More praise for Jacques came our way when
Frank Dibb of the Oxford Times reviewed the week of plays presented at the
Festival.
He said that as he had already written
about the ETC production, he didn’t propose to give it any detailed
consideration but ‘must, again, compliment the producer, John Duncan, on his
brilliantly contrived puppet treatment of the characters … The cast, too,
notably Richard Hampton as Jacques, Wendy Varnals as Roberta, and Gordon
Honeycombe and Ronnie de Sousa as the fathers, had enhanced their already
considerable achievements of a few weeks ago and by doing so given additional
point to Ionesco’s fearsome social satire.’
The production of Hamlet presented by the
Dramatic Society of University College in London,
was criticised by Frank Dibb for the cast’s lack of projection and
‘conversational mumbling.’ The Hamlet,
played by Tony Garnett, was ‘a prime offender in this regard’ and ‘woefully
lacked poetry.’ In nine years’ time
Tony Garnett would be the BBC TV producer who asked me and Neville Smith to put
together a play about the fans of the Everton football team, which became a widely
praised Wednesday Play called The Golden Vision. It was directed by Ken Loach and filmed on
location in Liverpool and London.
Loach was now President of OUDS and had
given himself a leading role in Measure for Measure, which was the OUDS major
for 1960 and opened at the Playhouse on Monday, 1 February. Apart from playing Angelo he also directed
the play with Merlin Thomas, a modern languages don from New College
and Senior Member of OUDS. ‘Quite
disgraceful,’ remarked Loach later, ‘to direct and play the lead.’
In a letter to my mother dated Saturday,
16 January, in which I informed her I had bought ‘a pair of cheaper than usual
cavalry twill trousers’ for £3, that it had been snowing for three days, and
that there had been a power failure for about an hour at dinner-time, when
candles had to be lit in the hall so that we could see what we were eating, I
said, ‘Term officially begins tomorrow, Sunday, but everyone came up yesterday,
Friday. Not been doing much rehearsal
for Measure for Measure, as I’ve only a small part; and despite this and
production arrangements for The Miracles, I’ve managed to get the rest of my
vacation work done.’
The ‘small part’ was that of the Second
Gentleman, and as the auditions for the play were held at the end of the Winter
Term it may have due to the success of Jacques that I was given a part in an
OUDS production for the first time. I
also served as a prisoner in a stylised prison scene. My two scenes as Second Gent in Act One
were shared with Richard Hampton as Lucio, and Stephen Cockburn as the First
Gentleman. All three of us, from Univ,
pretended to be rather rowdy and jokey university types. We all wore cod-pieces and tights. My costume was brown and soldierly, which
suited the beard I’d grown for The Miracles.
Keith Miles, who played a grey-faced, worried-looking Provost leaning on
a stick, completed a quartet of performers from Univ. Neil Stacy, from Magdalen, was the Duke, and
Elizabeth Gordon, from St Hilda’s, was Isabella.
On
Monday, 1 February I wrote to my mother, ‘I’m writing this from a Playhouse
dressing-room in a pause in this afternoon’s dress rehearsal for Measure for
Measure. The first night is tonight,
beginning at 7.45 pm. We’ve been
rehearsing a great deal recently.
Yesterday, which was the first dress rehearsal, we began at 6.0 pm and
didn’t get away till 1.0 am – most of it just waiting while technical problems
were sorted out. When we had run
through the play there were photographs to be taken, and that took some time while
they were posed. In between times I’ve
been dealing with production matters for The Miracles, which has a clear
fortnight before its first night.’
I continued, ‘On Saturday I went up to London for a dinner for
the students who had been last summer in Pinewood. Dr McCann was there, and we had a very good
meal for 14/6. Got an evening excursion
train ticket.’ Of this I have no
recollection. ‘The river has
overflowed, but now it’s going down -- not much flooding though, and the
weather’s milder. The play is going to France on 13
March, and I’ll be going with them – but it’s not definitely fixed yet. Term ends on 11 March. Have to go down now and see how far they’ve
progressed.’
The production wasn’t greeted with rave
reviews, or even good ones. ‘Good
impression not sustained,’ was the headline of The Times review, and the Daily
Telegraph’s was ‘Efficient but a bit chilly.’
The Times said that Ken Loach and Neil Stacy ‘did not make their parts
interesting – Mr Loach forgot to endow his Deputy with a conscience, and Mr
Stacy seemed increasingly bewildered by the discoveries about his own
dukedom.’ The Daily Telegraph commented
that Neil Stacy’s Duke, by ‘making the character into something of an old woman,
largely by use of pedantic pronunciation, did little to explain his strange
behaviour.’ Nonetheless, from 1964,
Stacy went on to have a serviceable and long-lasting career as a television
actor, appearing in many TV series and plays.
All the reviewers thought the bawds and
comics were mostly successful, and everyone praised the Isabella of Elizabeth
Gordon. Don Chapman in the Oxford Mail
enthused, ‘She plays the part with burning intensity, still, but susceptible as
a candle-flame; a frail beauty, reflecting in the classic flicker of face and
hand the torment of her spirit … A beautiful performance.’
A future television critic, Peter Fiddick,
played a servant. A future drama
critic, Michael Billington, who’d played small parts in several plays at Oxford, including
Cuppers, and would direct a Sunday night ETC production of Nigel Dennis’s The
Making of Moo, was by this time the drama critic of Cherwell. He wrote a hostile review of Measure for
Measure and was accused in print by Loach of sour grapes, as Billington had
auditioned for the OUDS production and didn’t get a part.
A contemporary of Billington at St
Catherine’s was David Rudkin.
Billington said later, ‘Rudkin was obviously a huge talent -- a Midlands
Irishman with a preacher-father, a Joycean gift for language and an omnivorous
passion for the cinema.’ Several of his
plays were read at the college’s Apollo Society, including one called Afore
Night Come – which would have a very significant but indirect effect on my
future acting career.
I sent my mother, who was still sending me
parcels, some of the reviews of Measure for Measure – ‘which as you see wasn’t
such a success although it was sold out – however the public seem to have
enjoyed it more than the critics and some of the cast.’
On the Sunday after the last night of
Measure for Measure I attended the annual all-male OUDS Dinner. Richard Goolden, who was 65 and had played
Mole in Wind in the Willows since 1930, was the guest of honour. Peter Bayley, as an OUDS Senior Member, was
there, as were Richard Hampton, Stephen Cockburn and Mike Fletcher from Univ,
and 30 others, including Peter Fiddick and the only one of us who would achieve
some national fame as a stage and television actor, Oliver Davies.
The Miracles now went into its last two
weeks of rehearsal. It was already
attracting a lot of attention, mainly through word of mouth. Don Chapman of the Oxford Mail interviewed
both me and Duncan and wrote a lengthy article in the Mail about the production
under the headline ‘Passion play is a gigantic task.’ It was, he said, ‘a staggering enterprise
in college drama.’ He described the
genesis of the mystery plays themselves and how I had had ‘the ingenious idea
of trying to dovetail together from them one full-length play,’ while I was in
hospital having contracted TB. He was
told by Duncan that about a quarter of the college was involved in the
production – actors and technicians and those who had never acted before,
including ‘the President of the JCR, one or two sporting Blues and about half
the college Rugby team.’
Chapman said, ‘More than £200 has been
raised in guarantees, a number of Oxford
firms have given materials for costumes and properties; Pusey House has agreed
to the use of its beautifully appropriate chapel.’ Permission to use the chapel had been sought
by me from the Principal of Pusey House, an Anglo-Catholic establishment in St
Giles’, by me rather than by Duncan, whose dishevelled and unhealthy appearance
might have been off-putting. I had to
establish which areas might be used as changing-rooms, where the toilets were
and the power sources, whether there was a sound system, and whether we could
get onto the top of the rood screen.
There was a wide flat area in front of the rood screen and there we
could position rostra of different heights and some necessary steps. Entrances would be made through the rood
screen’s doors and a side door, except when the crowd entered Jerusalem from
the big west door at the far end of the chapel and ran down the aisles, and
when the four Torturers brought Jesus, shouldering his cross, down the central
aisle to be crucified in the centre of the stage.
Rehearsals,
said Chapman, were taking place in ‘a dusty lecture hall in the High, above the
Shelley Memorial Room.’ He continued,
‘The man most likely to pull it off, as his co-producer will be the first to
admit, is John Duncan, a tall rangy figure with long sideboards. He is probably the most talented
undergraduate producer at the University.’
Duncan’s recent successes were noted -- Jacques and A Woman Killed with
Kindness, in which Chapman said that Duncan had achieved ‘a beautiful
presentation of the play and its presentation in the open’ – and he concluded,
‘The truth is that he likes to face a challenge, which is why he is getting
such immense pleasure out of The Miracles.’
Chapman urged everyone to see the Univ Players production.
I was asked by Isis
to write an article about The Miracles, and it appeared on 10 February,
accompanied by a photo of Syd Norris, his shoulders draped in a white sheet as
his costume hadn’t been made. I wrote
about how the play came to be written and how the mystery plays developed from
‘sung embellishments to the Mass, from antiphonal choruses to dialogue between
individuals, and finally to complete dramatic representations of parts of the
Gospel story, and eventually portions of the Old Testament too.’ I said, ‘In time, church representations
moved outside, and became secularised, as monks and priests found the developing
plays and casts beyond their resources.
Thus each guild in an enterprising town came to be honoured with the
staging of one particular and appropriate play: in the York cycle, the Fishers and Mariners
presented the play of Noah, while the Butchers staged the Crucifixion. The cycles were an annual event, usually
staged as a holiday attraction at the Feast of Corpus Christi, and taking
several days.’
I concluded, ‘Our first aim has been to
make the plays intelligible to all, but neither production nor translation have
sacrificed the medieval spirit, with the attendant vigour, humour and
vulgarity, the brutality and awe, the love of colour and excitement. In fact, the production will be, as far as
possible, a re-creation of a medieval performance.’
Copies of both these articles and two
items from Cherwell were sent to my mother with a letter written on Tuesday, 16
February, which was the first night of The Miracles. I must have written it that morning. I
said, ‘We had two dress rehearsals yesterday, in the afternoon and evening, and
they went quite well. Today, before the
first night, there’s checking up to be done on props, seating, lighting and
other details. Tickets have all been
sold bar about 100, so it’s possible we’ll be sold out during the seven
performances … Must be going to College now.
Just as cold down here and it’s difficult getting up in the
morning. But yesterday’s snow is going
with the sun.’
The seven performances in Fifth Week
included two matinees, at 5.0 pm. Such
was the demand for tickets that we put on an extra matinee. The evening performances were at 8.15. Posters, which I designed myself and
delivered on my bicycle to all the colleges, informed people that tickets,
price 2/6, were only obtainable, in advance and not at Pusey Chapel, at the
Porter’s Lodge of University College. I
also designed the lay-out and content of the programme, which bore the logo of
an angel taken from a stained-glass window.
The names of none of the actors were given in the programme, just the
characters they played and in which play they appeared.
During the performances, when I wasn’t
onstage as Peter, I checked that the cast had all arrived and that there were
no problems. They had all been asked,
however brief their appearance in the play, to be there at the start and stay
until the end, when they all crowded onto the stage with their lighted
tapers. I went around hushing them
backstage and in the wings as the play progressed. Some had had more than a few beers, but they
were gratifyingly considerate and careful with their costumes and props.
Before the first performance, Duncan and I
gathered them all together and made short speeches about what was expected of
them – they were to be very quiet, except when they were on stage, and not
leave any litter – ‘No fag-ends in the font,’ said Duncan. I asked them, whatever their beliefs, and
even if they had none, to remember where they were, in a chapel, and I reminded
them that the plays had been an act of worship for the original medieval
performers – also that for two hours they had to believe that what they were
performing had really happened and was real.
In the end nobody missed a cue or forgot
their words and the recorded angels’ song and other recorded music rang out
when required. There was nearly a nasty
accident, however, when the heavy cross, with Syd Norris already tied to it,
was being lifted up by the four Torturers before being set upright in its
wooden base. It skidded on the stone
floor and tilted, and if it had fallen, with Syd face-down on it, he would have
been crushed. But brute force held it
up and it was manhandled into place.
Pete Hudson was the First Torturer and Richard Ingrams was the Fourth.
One of the several emotional scenes that
were performed without words, like the emergence of Lazarus from his tomb, was
the taking down of the limp body of Jesus from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea
(Robin Butler) and Nicodemus (David Myers).
In silence they untied him, concealing the removal of the dummy nails as
they did so, and taking off the crown of thorns, and laid him in the lap of
Mary at the foot of the cross, like a Pieta, where she touched his face and
smoothed his hair and silently wept.
I sent my mother some of the reviews and
told her that The Miracles had been very well received. I said, ‘We were sold out for all seven of
the performances, and were refusing people from the College Lodge where tickets
were sold. The College authorities are
pleased with the success of the show, and we had a very fine cast party in the
College Beer Cellar on Tuesday last.’
Duncan and I were presented by the cast with glazed clay ornaments made,
appropriately, by P Pope, one of an angel and the other of a shepherd with a
dog. He chose the latter, I the
angel. I have the angel to this day.
Several liaisons were formed during the
show and two ended in marriage. The
First Torturer (Pete Hudson) and Mary Magdalene (Valerie Karn) became an item;
the 3 Shepherd (Derek Wood) would marry Sally Clarke, and Joseph of Arimathea (Robin
Butler) married Jill Galley. Apart from
achieving the impressive combination of a First in Classics and a Rugby Blue,
Robin later on became Cabinet Secretary to three Prime Ministers, including Mrs
Thatcher, after which he was ennobled as Lord Butler of Brockwell, and then
became Master of Univ in 1998.
In the Oxford Mail on Friday, 19 February,
1960, Frank Dibb wrote that there was ‘a magnificently direct and sinewy
quality about most of the language in these plays … strong alliteration for
instance, and often salty humour … John Duncan and Gordon Honeycombe in their
production have achieved not only visual beauty (I shall not readily forget the
Angel Gabriel poised aloft in compelling tableau), but have, rightly, not
minced matters where the grimmer aspects of the plays are concerned. The whipping of Christ and his crucifixion
are not lightly glossed over, and the whole production has a virility and
integrity and, in the best sense of the word, dignity. I must also compliment Mr Duncan and Mr
Honeycombe on their handling of the crowd scenes, which have a lusty animation
that never degenerates into comicality, finely judged dramatic use of colourful
costumes (some of these are very rich) and a mobility and flexibility in a
limited acting area which is at all times wholly admirable. The actors remain anonymous, but they have
no reason to be ashamed of their labours.
There is a commendable, masculine, excellently spoken Christ, a magnificently
resonant Gabriel, a compelling sinister Judas (who looked as though he might
have stepped out of a Rembrandt or a Caravaggio), a vividly operatic Herod, a
quietly dignified Pilate, and a Peter who was eminently relaxed.’
It was a triumph. For the next three weeks, until the end of
the term, we were congratulated by people who had seen the production, and
somewhat bemusedly, and privately, we gloried in what we had achieved.
The Hilary Term ended on Saturday, 12
March. Two days later I travelled
across the Channel to France.
It had been the custom since 1923 for OUDS
to take its major productions on tour to European countries. Once the group went to the USA. In the second half of March 1960, Measure
for Measure toured France.
I told my mother, ‘We leave England for
France on Monday, March 14th; we perform at Caen on the 16th,
at Versailles on the 18th; we leave Paris for Clermont Ferrand on
the 19th and perform in Clermont on the 21st; arrive in
Aix-en-Provence on the 22nd … We have a bus most of the way in
France, and accommodation will be in the Universities where we are
playing. There are only 4 actual
performances, so we’ll have plenty of time for enjoying the trip through France. From Aix the main party leaves on the 25th,
to return to Paris and London.
I will leave them in Aix and take a week extra to visit some friends in Italy, Switzerland
and Germany
… returning about 6th April.’
I also told her, ‘I’m writing to some of the people I met on the Summer
Course last year, to see if they can put me up.’
Those whom I was able to visit after the
OUDS tour were Yves Wendels, who’d been at Pinewood, an Italian, Franca
Sacchetto, and a German girl called Brigitte, who’d both been on the summer
course at St Clare’s. Only Yves was
able to accommodate me.
There were some cast changes for the
French tour. Peter Holmes, who had been
Escalus, became Angelo, and Escalus was now played by Oliver Davies. In time he became the Oliver Ford Davies of
National Theatre fame. Although he was
three years younger than me, he had one of those faces and voices that made him
seem older than he was, especially when bearded, as he was then. Apart from those two, Stephen Cockburn took
over as Claudio and Gavin Millar became the Provost. Neil Stacy and Elizabeth Gordon continued
as the Duke and Isabella, and Caroline Threlfall repeated her double of Mariana
and Mistress Overdone. John Henderson,
Univ Players’ Herod, joined the company as a lord, a prisoner and an officer,
and understudied the leads. In all, the company numbered 28, seven of whom
were girls. Merlin Thomas accompanied us, acting as our
liaison officer with our French hosts, and supervising the set-ups in each
theatre where we played.
Although I had passed through France on the school trip to Switzerland,
this was my first real visit, and I was struck by the differences in traffic,
buildings, meals, and aspects of the French way of life. France even smelled different. My French lessons at the Edinburgh Academy
turned out to be useful in shops, in reading signs and newspapers, and in very
basic conversations with the French families with whom we stayed. We attended civic and other receptions in
each town, drank a great deal of wine and decided we didn’t like Gauloise
cigarettes. We were taken aback by the
vociferous acclaim of the audiences, who hailed the performances of ‘la troupe
d’Oxford’, to our surprise, as ‘une soirée exceptionelle’ – ‘inoubliable’ –
‘remarquable’ – and in Clermont-Ferrand applauded so enthusiastically that we
had six curtain calls.
The civic reception in the Town Hall of Clermont-Ferrand, given by the Lord
Mayor and Councillors, was the largest of its kind and the speeches the
longest. The cast were split up among
the many tables in the ‘le grand salon’, each of us being parked at a table
among ten French people, whose English was virtually non-existent. In a photo that appeared in the local
newspaper, La Liberté, I’m listening, apparently attentively, to some speech
from the top table. I’m wearing
thick-rimmed glasses and what looks like a tartan tie and there’s a white
handkerchief in the breast pocket of my jacket. Opposite me is Elizabeth Gordon. We became quite friendly during the tour.
The
first performance of Measure for Measure was at Caen
in northern France. ‘The performance at Caen was very well received,’ I told my
mother in a postcard showing the very modern university. ‘The French seem to see more subtleties in
the language than we had noticed. We
began at 9.0 pm and I wasn’t back in the family’s flat until about 1.0 am. Then up early on the Thursday morning to
catch the 9.14 am train to Paris,
arriving at St Lazare station at 12.35.
Played bridge on the baggage outside the station, then a quick lunch
before a bus from S.H.A.P.E came to take us to Shape HQ near Versailles.
There we were given two talks on Nato and Shape policy, had a group
photo taken, and then a drinks reception in the Officers’ Mess, where our Service
hosts met us. Mine is a naval
commander. Today, Friday, will have a
look around Versailles
and perform tonight.’
Copies of the group photo were sent to
all of us – ‘NATO Unclassified.’ On the
back of the photo it said, ‘THE MEMBERS OF THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY AMATEUR
DRAMATIC SOCIETY, TODAY (17 MARCH 1960), VISITED SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED
POWERS EUROPE, NEAR PARIS, FRANCE. THEY
WERE WELCOMED AND BRIEFED AT THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY HEADQUARTERS BY COLONEL
WILLIAM T RYDER, US
ARMY, DEPUTY CHIEF OF PUBLIC INFORMATION.’
The theatre at Versailles was adjacent to the palace. It was old, shabby, not large, and full of
strange smells. The toilets were holes
in the floor. I knew nothing of the
history of Versailles,
or of the French Revolution and the terrible treatment and executions of Louis
XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette. It
was a grey, cold day and the extensive formal gardens were neither colourful
nor glorious, and the interior of the palace was filled with faded, empty, gilded,
mirrored rooms. I didn’t take to Versailles, nor to Paris,
with its vast open spaces, speeding cars and monumental buildings. I told my mother that we ‘spent an undecided
day in Paris,
mostly in the Metro, cafés and finally a cinema.’ We then entrained at 11.15 pm for Clermont-Ferrand.
Here
we began to enjoy ourselves, mainly with large intakes of food and drink, and
wallowed in the plaudits of the French.
I told my mother that the Clermont theatre was bigger than those at Caen and Versailles. I said, ‘We were given three receptions, one
by the Mayor and Corporation in the Town Hall.
None of my family spoke English, although the young son was learning, so
French conversation was odd. Left Clermont
on Tuesday afternoon, great run by train through the high hills and ravines,
south to Marseilles,
where we dined and retrained for Aix.’
After the final performance of the OUDS
tour on 24 March at Aix-en-Provence,
where it was appreciably warmer, the following day I waved goodbye at a railway
station to the company, who were heading back to England. I then set out for Grenoble, not knowing exactly where it was,
nor what I would do there, nor where I would stay.
Having picked up my mother’s letters at a
Post Restante and seen something of Aix on the Friday, I resourcefully got a
coach from Aix to Grenoble
at 9.45 on the morning of Saturday, 26 March.
I sat at the front, admiring what I saw of the French countryside and
the lower Alps. At Laragne there was time for a meal at a
half-hour comfort stop and then it was on to Grenoble, where we arrived at 4.30 pm. Here
Yves Wendels met me and we boarded a rickety coach for St Hilaire du Touvet,
which was north-east of the town on a plateau of green meadows some 3,000 feet
up above the valley of the River Isère.
The road thither was narrow, steep and winding, and the coach-driver
clung to it, at times seeming as if he might go over the edge into the valley
far below.
There was a complex of new buildings
outside the village, which formed a TB sanatorium where Yves worked as a
tutor/lecturer. They backed onto dense
pine forests that climbed up more mountain slopes to beetling crags above. Snow had left the area a week or so ago, but
it remained on the higher ground. Primroses
bloomed in profusion everywhere.
Although it was cloudy on most of the days I was there, on the Sunday
the sun shone and the views of distant mountains, including Mont
Blanc, were magnificent. But
there wasn’t much to do. Because Yves
was at work during the week I was at a loose end during the day and went for
walks and read. Normally he would have
eaten in the canteen of the sanatorium, but as I couldn’t be admitted there, in
the evenings he cooked some simple meals and we picnicked in his rooms. Although he had been cheerful company at
Pinewood, at St Hilaire he was preoccupied with his work and we didn’t seem to
have much in common. He also had a
girl-friend whom I never saw. When I
descended the perilous road by coach early on the Thursday, I was quite glad to
be moving on. But things didn’t turn
out that well in Venice
either.
It was a 13-hour journey from Grenoble to Venice, with
one change of trains, in France,
on the way. The trains were smarter and
cleaner I thought than English ones, and the scenery en route much more
diverse. The Italian girl, Franca
Sacchetto, whom I was meeting in Venice,
had been on the St Clare’s summer course for foreign students the previous year
and I looked forward to seeing her again.
She was tall and fair-haired and had features that were a mix of the
actresses Monica Vitti and Capucine.
Unfortunately, when I arrived, I found that she had recently broken a
leg when skiing and was housebound.
I had some meals at the family home on
the Lido, and although, as I told my mother,
this saved me some expense, I was at a loose end once again. But this time there was a lot to see and do,
and each morning I sallied forth from my bed and breakfast lodging by a canal
and revisited places I’d been to in 1953, as well as exploring the narrow
alleyways and the interior of ancient Venetian churches. The opulence and size of the paintings of
Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were astounding. But it was series of paintings in a small
church called Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, that caught my imagination
the most. The church was squashed
between a canal, the steps of a bridge and another building. Inside were nine wide panels on the walls of
the church, painted by Vittore Carpaccio at the beginning of the 16th
century and showing scenes from the lives of St George, St Jerome and St Tryphon. They were less lush than the works of the
other painters, but packed with figures and incidents that told a story.
Venice
was one of those cities where I felt at home, and as the former Moor of Venice,
Othello – my schoolday appearance as Fiametta being forgotten -- I sat in a
café in the sunshine of St Mark’s Square, taking it all in, the basilica, the
crowds and the music.
I left Venice on Monday, 4 April. There was a train that went direct to Basel in Switzerland,
where I had to change to another train for Düsseldorf. It was a long journey, which cost 12,770
lira, as I needlessly told my mother, for that wouldn’t have meant anything to
her. One shilling equalled 85 lira, I helpfully
added.
I arrived at Basel at 9.30 pm, and transferred my suitcase
and a carrier bag that contained my train ticket and my passport to a sleeping
compartment on the train for Düsseldorf.
As I was early and there was about half an hour before the train left, I
went out onto the platform to exchange some of my Italian money for German
marks. Having done so, I returned to
the platform -- to see my train disappearing into the night, taking my case,
passport and ticket with it. In a panic
I rushed around, trying to find some English-speaking official who might
telephone ahead, to the next station, or even stop the train, or at least tell
me what to do. Some man told me that I
should get a taxi to the next station up the line, as the train stopped there
for a few minutes. So I did, urging the
taxi-driver in broken English, Italian and French to go as fast as he
could. Scattering my new marks in his
direction I leapt from the taxi and ran into the other station. And there was my train, steaming placidly at
a platform – and in my sleeping compartment were my very own case, etc. I was hugely relieved.
What had happened was that the train had
shunted off to the other station to collect some extra coaches. It then calmly returned to the station where
I had boarded it and, on time, we set off for Germany.
I told my mother, in the final postcard I
sent her during this trip, ‘Arrived Düsseldorf on Tuesday 6.45 am. Girl I knew on Oxford Summer Course showing
me around, took me to Cologne
yesterday; tonight we’re going to Düsseldorf Opera House to see
“Tannhäuser.” Leaving midnight
Thursday, via Ostend, Dover,
London, to Oxford,
where I will arrive about 5.0 pm on Friday.
Travelling up to Edinburgh (via Birmingham) on Saturday.’
I hadn’t seen Birgitte for over six
months, since September the previous year.
She, like Franca,
has also been on the three-week Summer Course at St Clare’s. I stayed in a flat that she was sharing, but
as with Yves, less so with Franca, circumstances had changed and she was living
her own life, among family and friends, all of them and every aspect of that
life being quite foreign to me.
Nonetheless she happily showed me around Düsseldorf and Cologne and took me to the opera.
German cities were still being rebuilt
after the war, and the new buildings and thoroughfares were stark and
treeless. Düsseldorf, an industrial
centre of some importance, with a large iron and steel works, had been extensively
bombed by the RAF. On 1 November 1944
they had dropped over 4,000 tons of bombs on the city. As someone from one of the victorious
nations in the war I felt awkward in Germany, as if I should apologise
for all the deaths, damage and destruction the RAF had caused.
I was back in Edinburgh on Saturday, 9 April.
My mother, who had always been
over-concerned about my health, warmth and general well-being, to my annoyance
– ‘Don’t fuss!’ I would protest – had written to Sid while I was still in France. My postcards must have been slow in reaching
her.
He replied on 30 March, ‘Do you think he
has absconded for good? He has
certainly gone off into the blue, and I’m afraid I can’t help you with any
addresses. A card posted on the 26th
from Grenoble said he was crossing the Alps by
coach, heading for St Hilaire du Touvet, then on to Venice on the 31st. But he would be sending me no more addresses
… Anyway he seems to be having a wonderful time, so there’s no need to feel
concerned. He’s big enough, old enough
and wise enough to get where he wants easily enough, and no doubt he will
return safe and sound on the predicted day.
Also, I shouldn’t worry about his health. Believe me, he is much better active than
idle. Everyone is very pleased that
after a year away he has got to grips again with Oxford life, and we feel sorry he has not got
all the credit he deserves for what he has done for Univ Players and the
College in the past term. No doubt he
has told you of his malodorous and offensive co-producer, Duncan? … If you are
concerned for his health you can take my word that he himself is his best
guardian. He knows his limits and stops
when he feels he is approaching them … We are notoriously opposed in our
temperaments and we try to lead a quiet life by not interfering unduly in the
other’s habits and outlook … We try to be good friends, as you say, but Ron
owes no more to me than I to him.’
Sid always wrote at much greater length
than me – including his essays. In this
letter he went on to say he was sorry about her arm and said he hoped to get a
State Scholarship so that he could continue his studies and read for a
B.Litt. He said, ‘Oxford is very pleasant in the
vacations. There are fewer people around
and you can do things you haven’t time for in term, as well as meeting people
whom you miss in the general throng of term.’
He said he was going to stay with ‘a mutual friend of Ron’s and mine at
her (yes!) home near Lichfield.’ This was Janet Lister, a small, perky person
with glasses whom I didn’t care for.
The association didn’t please me, nor did the fact that he was then
going off with Verne Caviness to York and Durham. Why wasn’t he going somewhere with me?
The fact that I had gone off to France, Italy
and Germany
with friends and had visited friends, was, to me, somehow not the same. My ‘friends’ turned out not to be enduring
friends at all, as I would learn would be the case with virtually all friendships. Friends at Oxford and elsewhere were more like
companionable associates, and even then I hardly ever made ‘friends’ with those
with whom I acted or with those who came from other colleges. It was the shared experience of college
life that determined your companions and you didn’t need to add to them from
elsewhere.
I returned to Oxford on Thursday, 14 April 1960, ten days
before the start of the Trinity or Summer Term, to rehearse another play for
the OUDS.
This play, The Waiting of Lester Abbs, was
by a novelist, Kathleen Sully. It had
been staged at the Royal
Court Theatre
three years earlier. Auditions for it
would have taken place the previous term and I was cast as The Figure. The producer was Bryan Stonehouse, a
likeable fellow from Queen’s College, who was killed in a holiday accident some
years later. In addition to the OUDS
majors, in the Spring and Summer terms, OUDS also presented experimental or new
plays every year, usually twice a year, for one day only. By this time Richard Hampton was the
President of OUDS; Oliver (Ford) Davies was the Secretary, and Neil Stacy was
the Steward. The Waiting of Lester Abbs
was staged at the Playhouse on Sunday, 1 May at 5.0 pm and 8.15 pm.
It was bit of a sweat getting together a
play for two performances only, and this play, apart from quite a large cast,
had five different scenes and was played with two ten-minute intervals between
the three Acts. As was usual with
undergrads who had been refused permission by their tutors to act or hadn’t
asked them, several of the cast used fake names, the most popular one being
Walter Plinge. A freshman, Sam Walters,
was cast as Lester Abbs, and I had little to do other than appear in an
ordinary jacket, trousers and tie and polished shoes, and acting as his
conscience, question him and comment on his actions.
Sam was a small, intense but affable man
and a very good actor. In 1971 he
founded the Orange Tree Theatre above a pub in Richmond
with his wife, Auriol Smith, and 40 years later he was still presenting plays
in their new, purpose-built Richmond
theatre. While at Oxford he and I would appear together in
three plays, and he became President of the ETC. Another good actor in Stonehouse’s
production, and there were several, was the saturnine David Senton, whom I
would cast as Satan the following year.
Michael Billington, writing in Cherwell at
the end of April, said, ‘Bryan Stonehouse ransacked the Royal Court files and
emerged, sanguine and smiling, with “The Waiting of Lester Abbs” by Kathleen
Sully, a novelist of distinction.
Lester Abbs is a schoolmaster, whose clumsy attempts to make contact
with his fellow beings all end in humiliating failure. For what is he waiting? The end of it all – an end which he
precipitates by accepting responsibility for a murder which he did not
commit. It sounds grim, but Stonehouse
assured me that the play is shot through with humour. The main acting burden falls on Sam Walters,
a Merton freshman, who plays the eponymous, virtually omnipresent hero …
Important parts also go to David Senton, who scored a palpable hit in Lincoln’s
Chekhov entry in Cuppers, and to Gordon Honeycombe, Univ’s actor-producer.’
Billington’s later review was headed ‘Too
Much Waiting For Too Little in Lester Abbs.’
He said, ‘The play has a fundamental compassion that one cannot but
admire. It has some effective scenes –
the one in the pub is riotous. But it
is hopelessly muddled in its style … Fortunately there were some good
performances from some little-known names.
Sam Walters as Lester Abbs was surprisingly never irritating and
frequently moved us with a wonderful, hopeless, spaniel-eyed stare.’ Don Chapman in the Oxford Mail called the
play ‘a tragic fantasy’ and said that Bryan Stonehouse had given it a brave and
thoughtful production. Sam Walters,
David Senton and I were singled out for praise.
The drama critic of The Guardian said,
‘Sam Walters conveys the badly wrapped parcel of fumbling loneliness with
surface fidelity and such depths as the part offers. But the character once presented there is
not a lot more to be said about him … There is a scene worthy of Emil Jannings,
when he is gathered up in the whirling extroversion of a joyous proletarian
family in a pub, spun around for a while and then rejected in misunderstanding
and disgust; but the similar scene of his failure with a prostitute is less
effective … Beyond this point the continuity, already hamstrung by scenery
which took no account of the capabilities of stage hands to move it, received a
mortal blow. Lester Abbs finds the
prostitute’s corpse and confesses to her murder; his retraction is believed
neither by the Court nor by his egomaniac mother. In the condemned cell scene (with the
orthodox accompaniment of kindly warders, accusing phantasms, and a shaft of
light through the prison bars enhaloing him) … there is a long and fairly dull
duologue with the real murderer. After
a declaration of his faith in the hereafter … he is dragged out to execution, crying
for more time. The supporting cast
showed tremendous power in the few places where they were given the chance, and
in spite of messy stage mechanics and lighting the production had an
authoritativeness which showed the clear advantage of the close co-operation
between the producer and the authoress.’
This was my biggest part to date in an
OUDS production. The following month my
next appearance, though in a much smaller part, would be in the biggest and
most celebrated production Oxford
had seen for many years.
The first part of Christopher Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine the Great was staged in London
in 1587 when Marlowe was only 23. It
was one of the first plays in English to be written in blank verse and such was
its success that he wrote a sequel, Part Two, which was staged the following
year. Both parts were published in
1590, three years before Marlowe was murdered. John Duncan cut and edited both plays,
making one play out of them, which concluded with a 20 minute monologue of 332
lines containing most of the speeches made by Tamburlaine in Part Two. His composite play was presented as the
OUDS summer major in the rear gardens of St John’s College,
the first night being on Tuesday, 14 June.
Tickets cost from 2/6 to 6/6.
Those sitting at the front of the raked tiers of seats in the huge stand
erected for the occasion were liable to be spattered with sweat and fake blood
and see less of the spectacle than those further back who could look down on
the wide grass arena that was the stage.
Every entrance and exit, apart from the opening speech of the Chorus,
was done at the run.
Although a few parts were doubled, the
cast numbered more than 40, and included several of Duncan’s Univ drinking pals, like Bob Stober,
Barry Porter and Ron Riley, as well as Richard Hampton, playing an uncredited
Chorus, Richard Ingrams, Stephen Cockburn, Syd Norris, Peter Stone and
myself. I had about six lines as the
King of Soria and the doubtful distinction of being one of ‘the pampered jades
of Asia’ who ended up dragging Tamburlaine in
a chariot full tilt across the grassy stage while he lashed us with a
whip. And he really did. Wendy Varnals, Duncan’s girl-friend, was Zenocrate,
Tamburlaine’s beloved, and Valerie Karn, Pete Hudson’s girl-friend, was her
maid. Duncan was a company man and liked having his
stalwarts and supporters around him, who believed in him and could be trusted
on stage to do what he wanted. The
other male leads, Tamburlaine’s chief companions, were Sam Walters
(Usumcasane), Oliver Davies (Theridamas) and Matt Leighton (Techelles). Tamburlaine himself was played by the former
Escalus and Angelo of Measure for Measure, Peter Holmes.
Peter was 23, not that tall, with small dark
brown eyes and a confiding, smiley personality. He’d been at school in Liverpool,
where an English master inspired in him a love of literature and encouraged his
acting talents. Gypsies were among his
ancestors. A lively conversationalist,
he enjoyed a smoke and a drink and conversing with chums. He usually wore high-necked sweaters and gym
shoes without socks. Like Ken Loach,
Peter had been at St Peter’s Hall, reading English. He’d acted at school but had been prevented
from acting at Oxford
by his tutor. Instead, he did some
play-readings, appeared in one-night cabaret shows and played cricket for a
college side, The Harvesters – ‘I wore a top-hat, choker, velvet waistcoat,
high-winged collar, and my grandfather’s wedding trousers.’ It was only after he had obtained a Third in
English that he began acting in Measure for Measure, while earning a living by
labouring as a navvy with a gang of Irish workmen on the building of a
by-pass.
A month or so after the production of
Tamburlaine came to an end, Harold Hobson, drama critic of The Times, wrote a
lengthy article about Peter, which was headed ‘Born Actor with a Pick?’
Hobson said of him, ‘His infectious
vitality, and a curious air of calm independence, almost of isolation, gives Mr
Holmes’s conversation an authority like that of his stage presence … By the
last performance his voice, which normally spans three octaves, had become
displeasingly harsh, yet he held the attention for 332 lines of monologue and
action for some 25 minutes, in competition with recorded organ music from four
loud-speakers and with dance music from the Commemoration Ball at neighbouring
Wadham.’
Speaking about Tamburlaine, Peter told
Hobson, ‘We gave seven performances of it this summer and two dress rehearsals,
one of which was seen by the press. One
matinee had to be cancelled because of my voice. On the Thursday the middle register went, on
Friday the top register … The main difficulty was having to speak immediately
after a 30-40 yard sprint. Our
producer, John Duncan, had decided that Tamburlaine’s god was Energy. Instead of stately processions, he wanted us
to sweep across the stage. For the last
two weeks of rehearsal I gave up smoking, cut down on beer and did morning
runs, the round of Christ Church Meadows.
After that, fitness improved and running about Oxford to and from rehearsal was enough.’
In his review in The Sunday Times, Hobson
wrote, ‘The university actors run, leap, glide, jump and vault over the
colossal expanse of grass with enlivening zest … From time to time they pause
in their athletic feats, and show that the strength of their lungs remains
unimpaired by their muscular exertions … Many of the best moments in the
production are visual: the stringing up of one of Tamburlaine’s enemies, and
the spout of blood when he cuts the throat of his son … But sweeter incidents
are equally impressive, as when Oliver Davies’s Theridamas unexpectedly breaks
across the pageant of crime and murder with a plea of mercy for the conquered
Turks. And Peter Holmes’s Tamburlaine,
indefatigable and inexhaustible, is astonishingly good.’
Ken Tynan, writing in The Observer, said
of the production that it was ‘the most accomplished thing the OUDS has done
for years.’ He went on, ‘The lawn is
alive with swirling soldiers, who stop dead in their tracks the instant anybody
speaks; when the speech ends, they zoom about again, coming to rest in starkly
stylised postures as soon as the next syllable has been uttered … Peter Holmes,
burly as a young Spanish bull, brings to Tamburlaine a commanding presence, an
unflagging voice and tremendous emotional drive.’
The production, as well as Peter and John
Duncan, were also highly praised in the Oxford Mail. Frank Dibb wrote, ‘Peter Holmes’s
Tamburlaine is a staggering, almost an uncannily successful interpretation by
so young a player … His speaking has a tonal grandeur of utterance and a biting
urgency and clarity of projection of which the young actor can be justifiably
proud. He said of the rest of the cast,
‘Oliver Davies’s Theridamas is notable for its dignity and integrity. Wyndham Parfitt gives vivid expression to the
impassioned taunts of the captured Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks’ – who beats
his brains out on the bars of his cage – ‘as does Romola Christopherson to those
of his dethroned queen. Richard Ingrams,
as Mycetes, King of Persia, Matthew Leighton as Techelles, Sydney Norris as the
Governor of Damascus, Robert Stober as the Governor of Babylon (whose
arrow-pierced body is hoisted into a tree) and Gordon Honeycombe and Paul
Russell, the Kings who pull Tamburlaine’s chariot, are all impressively
truthful in their characterisations.’
Michael Billington in Cherwell said the
production was ‘bold, daringly imaginative and ultimately sensational’ -- ‘an
experience not to be missed’ and ‘something that will be talked of years
hence.’
AD and Doris Schwyn drove up from Bournemouth to see the play. She wrote, ‘It was a beautiful summer’s
evening, I recall, and a perfect setting for such a performance … with a large
area of well-kept grass, flowering shrubs and tall trees in full leaf that
looked as if they had stood there for many a long year … It was a large cast,
but we managed to single out Gordon. He
had a small part to play but acquitted himself well. I was impressed with the young man who
played Tamburlaine. He was outstanding,
I thought, in a very difficult part.
Darkness had fallen, but the night was clear and a gentle soft breeze
rustled the leaves on the trees, occasionally causing a bird to fly out in
alarm. With the noise of shouting,
fighting and clashing of swords in the arena below, the effect was very
realistic and dramatic.’
At the end of the play we all ran onto the
arena, Peter last of all, to take a confused and combined bow. Then we ran off, disappearing into the shrubbery
and the trees.
When the Summer Term ended, on Saturday,
18 June, I whisked back to Edinburgh, to make
the final preparations for the presentation, by University
College, Oxford of The Miracles on the Fringe of the
Edinburgh Festival in August, for a period of ten days.
Since 1953 the Oxford Theatre Group, made
up of elements from the OUDS and the ETC, had staged a play and a revue on the
Festival Fringe. Company accommodation,
in Masonic lodges and barren halls with limited washing and toilet facilities,
was barrack-like and primitive.
In September 1958, after my stint with the
Scottish Home Service in Glasgow
I had seen the OTG production on the Fringe of a previously unperformed play, The
Disciplines of War, by a new writer, Willis Hall. It was directed by Peter Dews and dealt with
the tensions among a group of soldiers in 1942 isolated in a hut in the Malayan
jungle during the Japanese advance. Its
cast of eight included Patrick Garland and David Webster. It was suspenseful, humourous and dramatic
and within four months was staged at the Royal Court
Theatre, directed this
time by Lindsay Anderson, with the new title of The Long and the Short and the
Tall, and starring Peter O’Toole, Robert Shaw and Edward Judd. Michael Caine was O’Toole’s understudy and
took over the part when the play went on tour.
In 1960 Univ Players’ college production
was going to compete with over 30 other Festival Fringe productions, which
included Schiller’s Wallenstein, with Peter Holmes in the leading role. That company was drawn from both Oxford and Cambridge
drama groups. The OTG staged a play
called Vasco and a revue, Never Too Late.
Vasco was directed by Adrian Brine, a close friend later on of the film
actor, Michael York (whose real name was Michael Johnson -- he was at Univ
after I left), and well reviewed by Harold Hobson and Alan Brien, who said, in
The Spectator, that apart from the Chekhov it was ‘the best play in the
Festival.’
We were also competing with a Festival revue
called Beyond the Fringe, which premiered at the Lyceum Theatre on 22 August
and featured four former graduates from Oxford
and Cambridge,
Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore. They were performing at the same time as us
and I never saw the show, not until it came to London.
Back in April, after I returned to Edinburgh from my European tour, I had scouted around the
centre of Edinburgh
looking for a suitable church for the Fringe presentation of The Miracles. Few places had an area before the altar,
free of pews, where rostra to form a stage might be assembled, and an upper
level where the Angel and the resurrected Jesus could appear. But an early 19th century church
with a spire, St Mary’s in the New Town, offered the best possibilities. Not far from the Edinburgh Academy
and Great King Street,
it had a very high central pulpit, long stained-glass windows and no pews, just
chairs, in the body of the kirk. The
minister agreed to us using his church and to the cast living in the church
hall.
Realising that we needed publicity to get
people to venture down to Bellevue
Crescent, I began sending promotional material to
Scottish newspapers and to some English ones, a practice I pursued until The
Miracles was under way.
The Edinburgh Evening News reported on 16
June, ‘The play … has already been presented with great success in Pusey House
Chapel in Oxford,
where it drew full houses every nigh for a week and gained unanimously
favourable Press reviews. Miss Frances
Mackenzie, of the British Drama League, wrote in Christian Drama, ‘It should be
seen again.’ She continued, ‘So great
was the demand for seats, in fact, that the Master of University College, Dr AL
Goodhart, was approached by several dons and asked to extend the run. This was not possible, but the company are
now, fortunately, able to revive the play in St Mary’s Parish Church,
Bellevue Crescent, Edinburgh, and have also been generously
offered the use of the church hall as accommodation. A cast and staff of 80 will feed and sleep
in the hall during their stay in Edinburgh,
all the catering being undertaken by members of the company themselves.’
Duncan
told the Oxford Mail, ‘People could sleep with friends and relations, but
because of the intensive rehearsals I want to put in on the production I am
asking all the cast to live together under one roof.’ In fact, hardly any of the cast had friends
or relations in Edinburgh
and living as cheaply as possible was a necessity for most. Communal life in the church hall assisted
the community spirit of the play – and forged further liaisons. Some of these arose because about 20 of the
original cast didn’t have the time to spend in Edinburgh, being away on a family holiday or
employed on a vacation job. So some of
the speaking parts, as well as some of the disciples and the crowd, were
boosted by newcomers, who had to be drawn from other male and female Oxford colleges.
I visited the Academy and was able to
persuade a few of the boys to take part.
One was PA Pond, later known as Paul Jones, lead singer with Manfred
Mann, who went on to have a very varied and creditable career in films and
television and on the stage. He was one
of the four Burghers in The Miracles, and although he only had ten lines to
say, one night when the Burghers were welcoming Jesus to Jerusalem, he dried.
Although I could have lived with the cast,
I couldn’t face the forced intimacies of communal living in the church hall,
where there were only two toilets, his and hers, and a very small kitchen, so I
slept at my mother’s place in Craiglockhart
Road. The
rows of mattresses on the church hall floor were not inviting, and Syd Norris
moved out after one night to stay with a friend. His mattress had fleas.
Most of the mattresses were donated by the
citizens of Edinburgh. Capitalising on the evident goodwill and
interest shown by the newspapers to the production – they liked the fact that
it had a religious content, that all the men, apart from Pilate and the high
priests, had grown beards, and that the cast was the biggest on the Fringe – I
enlisted the help of the Evening Dispatch and the Evening News. I even got a piece in the William Hickey
column of the Scottish Daily Express. I
rang them up and asked to talk to someone in Features. I was quoted in the News as saying, ‘We must
have 80 mattresses, or I don’t know what we’ll do … We shall be living in St
Mary’s Church Hall, Bellevue Crescent, where we are to present the play, and
although we have borrowed blankets from the Church of Scotland, they’re not
much use without something to take the hardness out of the hall floor … We have
240 blankets but no mattresses.’ Both Edinburgh papers
obligingly asked their readers to provide us with any spare mattress ‘in
reasonable condition’ and about 40 or 50 mattresses were in fact delivered to
the hall. Sensible members of the cast
brought their own sleeping-bags.
The Glasgow Herald did a perceptive piece
about the production. It said, ‘Gordon
Honeycomb [sic] is a very tall, very slim young man from Edinburgh with an impeccably trimmed
beard. He is reading English at University College,
Oxford, and, in
his spare time, but perhaps in the long run more rewarding, time he acts,
writes and produces plays … Mr Honeycomb’s beard is no student
affectation. There are 82 players, of
every creed and nationality, and all the men (save Pontius Pilate) have grown
beards and the women their hair. They
rightly know that real beards look better, and cost less, and, without
over-dramatising, they believe that what’s done in Oberammergau is good enough for them. It should also simplify shaving problems in
the church hall where all 82 of them will live.’
A photo appeared in the Evening News
showing ‘the advance party’ of The Miracles sorting out a heap of mattresses in
the church hall. Pictured, all smiling
and posing cheerfully, were Bill Tydeman, Derek Wood, Bill’s girl-friend,
Jacqueline Jennison, Valerie Karn, and me.
Bill, Derek and I all sported bushy but tidy beards.
This advance party, which included the
Technical Director, Richard Samuel, and the Stage Manager, David Wykes, had
driven up from Oxford
in a van that had been bought for £100 and painted light blue. It contained the costumes, props and the
cross. Lights, drapes and rostra were
hired in Edinburgh. Sid Bradley arrived with his Wardrobe
Assistants, Janet Lister and Meg Rothwell, and the Property Master, Trevor
Sweetman.
By the middle of August most of the
company were in Edinburgh – the newcomers and those with major speaking parts
arriving before the disciples and the crowd.
Rehearsals took place in the church hall as well as in the church when
possible. The first night was on
Wednesday, 24 August, 1960, at 8.0 pm, and the last night on Friday, 2
September, this one being a midnight matinee, which started at 11.0 pm. This was to allow other Festival companies
and theatre-goers to see the show. We
did three midnight matinees, and also performed on two Sundays, at 8.30
pm. Admission was by programme, 3/6,
unreserved. Programmes were obtainable
at the Festival Fringe Society’s Office, Rae Macintosh & Co in George Street, and
at the door.
The Evening News carried yet another story
about us on 18 August. It reported that while we were rehearsing in
the church hall a shopkeeper dashed in to tell us that our van, which had been
parked outside, was running away down the hill. It came
to rest against a wall. ‘Fortunately,’
said the News, ‘the wheels had been pointed in towards the kerb.’ The culprits were two small boys, who had
entered the cab and released the hand-brake.
Bill Tydeman, our business manager and 1 Shepherd, told the News, ‘We
lectured them about it, but I must say they were lucky to get out of the
cab.’ He said that the damage to the
front wing wasn’t too bad.
Apart from our posters, a bill-board
bearing laudatory quotes about the Oxford
production was constructed for a disciple, David Holloway, to carry about the
city streets, but posters on Corporation buses were banned. This accidentally created more publicity,
even in The Scotsman, which reported on 20 August, ‘Edinburgh Transport
Corporation Department have refused to carry a poster advertising a Festival
Fringe play, “The Miracles,” because it is of a religious subject … Mr WM
Little, Edinburgh Corporation transport manager, said last night: ‘The
corporation commercial advertising contract excludes for obvious reasons
politics, religion and gambling.” Bill
Tydeman was quoted as saying, ‘The SMT buses are carrying our poster. I think this is slightly old-fashioned.’
Bill was also quoted in the Evening
News. ‘We are conducting this play as a
drama. We have people of all types of
religion in the cast. There are even
atheists. We are not so much angry at
the decision as disappointed. We feel
that by losing this advertising we are losing a certain amount of people who
would come and see the play if they knew about it. We were to have had 50 posters on the buses.’
The Evening News headlined its story and a
photo of the poster and a frowning Valerie Karn: ‘FRINGE GROUP GET DOUBLE BLOW
– FROM CITY AND THE DUKE.’ I had sent a
telegram to the Duke of Edinburgh at Balmoral
Castle inviting him, as an Honorary Fellow
of Univ, to attend a performance of the play when he was in Edinburgh.
Somewhat to my surprise he actually replied, by telegram, regretting
that he was unable to attend during his short visit to Edinburgh on 3 September as he was already
fully committed.
Ministers of most of the major churches in
Edinburgh were
sent fliers by post with information about the production, in the hope that
these would be read to congregations when church notices were announced.
My manifold attempts to get publicity for
the show, to sell seats and thus cover our sponsored budget of £1,000 peaked
when I not only inveigled the management of the Festival production of Robert
Bolt’s The Tiger and the Horse at the Lyceum Theatre to allow The Miracles
company to see a dress rehearsal of the play, sitting in the Upper Circle, but
persuaded Vanessa Redgrave to come to the church hall to attend a haggis party
and judge a beard-growing competition.
I was admitted to her dressing-room during a rehearsal. A few months younger than me, and almost as
tall, she was acting in her first leading role with her father, Michael
Redgrave, who was playing a troubled Vice-Chancellor in a university like Oxford – which might have made her curious to see what
real Oxford
students were like.
She turned up at the church hall on
Friday, 19 August and she brought with her Alan Dobie and Jennifer Daniel, who
were also in The Tiger and the Horse. It’s
possible that Jennifer Daniel was in Oxford,
rehearsing The Relapse, when Jacques was staged at the Playhouse, and she may
have seen me perform. She had married
Dinsdale Landen, who was also in The Relapse, in 1959.
In the church hall, portions of haggis,
cooked on the premises, were doled out to the cast and their guests and, as the
Evening News said, ‘To many of the students it was their first (and possibly
their last attempt) at the national dish … The accompanying beverages were
suitable restrained since their quarters are a church hall.’ Vanessa gamely and with some laughter viewed
those of the cast who were sporting beards and judged the best beard to be that
of Herod (John Henderson). He won three
tickets to The Tiger and the Horse. The
smartest beard was that of one of the three Kings, George Cusworth, who wasn’t
from Univ – he received a mirror – and the winner of the scruffiest beard,
Derek Wood, was given a packet of razor blades. A booby prize, a bottle of plant food, went
to the 3 Shepherd, Trevor Sweetman, whose beard was patchy and almost
non-existent. Unfortunately there was
no press photographer to record the scene, although a couple of photographers
attended a dress rehearsal. No one in
the company had a camera.
Little did I or anyone imagine at the time
that within two years I would be appearing on the same stage as Vanessa.
The production of The Miracles in Edinburgh, which ran from
24 August to 4 September, 1960, was not as powerful in the antiseptic
surrounding of St Mary’s Church.
Although we had good audiences, the church was never packed. As at Oxford, none of the cast was identified
by name, and this time, in setting out the programme’s content, I put my name
before John Duncan’s, feeling that I had done much more than him in Edinburgh
to get the play promoted, produced and staged.
This being genteel Edinburgh, some of the
reviewers, expecting stained-glass attitudes and solemn reverence, were taken
aback by the comic Joseph, the noisiness of the crowd, by the brawllng
shepherds, the brutality of Herod and the coarseness of the Torturers
crucifying Jesus. One said, ‘Most of the cast are perhaps a little
boisterous for a religious drama, but the leading characters display the
decorum required.’ Another complained
that the crowd ‘made enough noise to fill the Usher Hall,’ and that ‘one or two
of the principals were also too loud in tone,’ the Angel Gabriel being ‘far too
strident in his message.’ He said that
‘the stark realism of the Crucifixion scene was strong meat, indeed, and it is
open to question whether this is, indeed, the best way to treat it.’ This reviewer, in The Scotsman, nonetheless
concluded, ‘The work that must have gone into the production is immense, and
great credit is due to those responsible.
If some of it was crude, it may well be all the nearer the truth for
that, and there were masterly touches.’
The Evening News commented that the play
was ‘an unvarnished, uncomplicated and straightforward life of Christ which is
most moving to see.’ The British Weekly
gave us the best and truest review. It said,
‘The piety and crude simplicity of these medieval masterpieces are all
preserved, and to witness this performance is a spiritual experience, too rare
in our religious life … This is not the Gospel Account but a medieval
interpretation of it … The crowds are missing in the Crucifixion scene … and
the stark simplicity of the scene and the way it is handled are admirable. The whole play is finely produced and
admirably dressed … This is the “mustest MUST” of the Festival.’
Unfortunately this review didn’t appear
until 8 September, when we had all gone home.
AD, who hadn’t seen the Oxford
production, was in Scotland
that summer and saw the Edinburgh
one. She found it ‘a most moving
experience.’ What my mother thought of
it I do not remember. But she would
have enjoyed meeting some of the cast after the performance and delighted that
I was evidently doing so well at Oxford
and knew so many people and was associated with the successful production of
plays.
Then it was back to Oxford and to 63 St John Street before the start of the
Michaelmas Term and of my final year.
I was now 24, as was Sid. Although he had been working on the costumes
for The Miracles in the Hilary Term, this hadn’t impaired his academic work,
for he had given up rowing, which was much more time-consuming, and in his
Finals in June he’d obtained a Second.
He was now studying for his B.Litt, which meant that most of his time,
as before, was spent in the College Library or the Radcliffe Camera looking at
books.
We were now leading quite different lives,
although we still went out together, to the cinema or for a meal.
A film we saw that made a strong
impression on me was Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, a thriller-horror film that
became a classic of its kind – as did a series of horror films made in colour
by Roger Corman in the 1960s. These,
like The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of
the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, were based on the tales of Edgar Allan
Poe, all of which I read about this time.
Earlier horror films of the late 1950s had also been memorable – films
like The House of Wax, The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Fly. They had strong stories, without the
excesses of bloody and violent deaths that characterise horror films these days
and make them, to me, truly horrible.
Sid’s life now had particular work and
social directions, like becoming a teacher or an academic, like getting married
and settling down – none of which appealed to me. I was into theatrical activities and
writing, and despite our differences I vaguely expected that we would live
together, somewhere and somehow, when we left Oxford.
Apart from my novel about schoolboys, then called All Our Yesterdays, I
had written a stage play about a family of four with domestic problems centred
on imagined incest. It had a multiple
set, showing various rooms in a house, and a cast of six. It observed the unities of time and place
and was called The Twelfth Day of Christmas.
At the end of the play, all the
doors were open and the truth revealed.
In the spring and summer vacations of
1960 I had dramatised Paradise Lost. This was done as a follow-up to The Miracles
and was aimed in part at proving that The Miracles wasn’t a one-off wonder and
that I could direct something on my own.
The adaptation was constructed entirely out of the speeches in Milton’s epic poem, which
told the story well enough. For later
staged readings I added a connecting narrative, spoken by Milton.
This later version was staged several times, twice with John Gielgud as Milton. I used the device of a narrator another
time, when I adapted Malory’s epic tales as a stage play called Lancelot and
Guinevere, which was staged at the Old Vic in 1980 with Timothy West, who had
also played Milton,
as Malory.
Before all this, Sid and I had written a
musical that probably had its genesis when I was in Pinewood. It was put together in 1958-59. A tape-recording of nine songs from the
show, in which I sang and played the piano – Joan Newman was also one of the
singers – was made towards the end of 1959.
A cassette of this recording, and a CD, still exists.
How and when exactly the musical was
written I don’t recall. Presumably it
was my idea, but as Sid had also written a short story and a play, it must have
seemed like a congenial thing to do – working creatively together. The trouble was that he wasn’t all that
enthusiastic about it. His academic work was much more important to
him. He read and studied more than I had
ever done, dutifully attending lectures and making notes. The writing of A Cat Called Dido, which took
a year, wasn’t high on his list of priorities and I had to push him to get it
finished. The book and lyrics were his
responsibility. I wrote the music,
emending some words in the lyrics to make them more singable and to fit the
melodies I devised.
My idea was that Dido, when finished,
might be staged by Univ Players or the ETC.
It never was. I don’t think Sid
believed it had any merit and that he only became involved in it to humour
me. He didn’t believe in its potential
or that it might ever be a success. In
fact I don’t recall that he ever wholeheartedly rejoiced in any of my
successes, at Oxford
or thereafter and, seemingly envious, was invariably grudging in his praise.
He was, however, most helpful in my
recurring visits to Cornwall
to inspect parish registers and note down every mention of a Honeycombe’s
birth, marriage or burial. We made two
such trips, hitch-hiking there and back, and living as cheaply as possible –
neither of us had much money to spare. Years
later, after I’d extracted Honeycombe names from every conceivable parish
register in Cornwall and Devon, and from printed volumes of registers in the over-heated
Genealogical Society’s rooms in Harrington Gardens in London, nearly all the
names connected, forming a pyramid that led back to a Matthew Honeycombe of St
Cleer, who lived there in the reign of Charles II. All the Honeycombes in the world were and
are related. All of them in the world
today were and are descended from that Matthew Honeycombe of St Cleer.
The plot of A Cat Called Dido was about
three male students, Orlo, Bill and James, on a walking holiday in some ancient
English county. They settle for the night in an old abandoned
mill. Here they encounter two girls,
Lally and Hannah, sisters, who are also exploring the area. There is a slim black cat in the mill which
on the stroke of midnight turns into a beautiful young woman called Dido. She had been cursed by a witch several
centuries ago and turned into a cat, but was allowed to reappear as herself
once a year. Within the space of a day,
the six pair off, Hannah with Bill, Lally with James, and Orlo with Dido. Orlo proves his love for Dido by resolving
to share his life with hers. At the end
of the show there is a storm and flood and the mill is wrecked. The other four leave, but Orlo, now a ginger
cat, remains with Dido.
With only one set and a cast of six I
thought the musical was eminently stageable by the ETC or Univ. It was comical and sadly romantic and had
some very varied melodies, like ‘Life’s like a musical comedy’ ‘No time for
love’ ‘Trial and error’ ‘Hypothesis’ ‘It’s happened again,’ and of course ‘A cat
called Dido.’
But nothing came of it, and being somewhat
deflated by Sid’s lack of enthusiasm and his disbelief in Dido, I didn’t pursue
its performance by theatre companies.
However, I tried for the last time to get it staged by the Palace Court
Theatre in Bournemouth in 1967, sending it to
a friend of my Aunt who was on the board of a local theatre company. But they were reluctant to try out something
new that wasn’t an established success. As it
happens, quite a few of the things I wrote were never published, developed or
taken up – including two books, a detailed synopsis of an epic film about
General Wingate, a stage play centred on a TV newsroom, called Newsflash, which
I wrote with Bryan Rostron, and several synopses of TV series and plays. Lucky chances don’t and didn’t always
happen.
Back in Oxford in October 1960, at the start of the
Michaelmas Term, I concentrated my showbiz ambitions and energies on the
ETC. Appearing before the ETC
Committee, before the President, Sam Walters, and the Committee’s members, who
included David Senton, Richard Sherrington and John Watts (and the ETC’s new
secretary, Esther Rantzen) I suggested that the ETC should present my
dramatisation of Paradise Lost, with me as the director, in the Hilary
Term. At the same time I embarked on
rehearsals for the ETC production at the Playhouse of Giradoux’s The Madwoman
of Chaillot, which was directed by Bryan Stonehouse.
I was still having weekly tutorials with
Peter Bayley and churning out weekly essays, and as John Duncan and I were now
in our third years, we were both assigned to extra tutorials with Stephen Wall,
who four years before this, when he was 25, had contracted polio. He tutored us from his wheelchair. He had married his physio, his second wife,
in 1958. I cycled to Wall’s North
Oxford flat, and Duncan
and I sat and listened as he discussed the Victorian novelists, in particular
Dickens and Trollope. The few essays we
wrote for him were annotated in pencil, when he tidied and tightened them. I think we only visited him for one term.
For some reason, perhaps because I was in
my third academic year I was among the undergraduates who were invited to the
Sheldonian Theatre on Friday, 4 November for the presentation of a Loyal
Address by the Chancellor of Oxford University to the Queen and Prince
Philip. I had never seen the Queen
before, except on television, and was suitably awed by the aura of majesty
surrounding her and by the theatricality of the occasion. The Royal Party entered the Theatre in
procession, the National Anthem was sung, the Chancellor spoke in Latin and the
Public Orator read the Loyal Address, which the Chancellor, after a short
speech in English, then handed to the Queen.
She replied, in the curiously affected English voice that she had in
those days, after which the Chancellor dissolved Convocation with another Latin
formula, and we all stood as the Royal Party left the Theatre, to the stirring
music of Walton’s March, Crown Imperial.
The first night of The Madwoman of
Chaillot was on Monday, 21 November, 1960.
The play had a large cast, who included, apart from me, John Watts, Mike
Fletcher and Andrew Szepesy from Univ. Janet Croly, who’d been Juliet in Measure for
Measure and Mary in The Miracles, played Irma.
I was the Baron; Sam Walters was the President; and David Senton the
Prospector. The Madwoman was Angela Pedlar. Ian
McCulloch, a rough-hewn, rangy character from St Peter’s Hall, with fairish
untidy hair, a good stage presence and an incisive voice, was the Peddler. Born in Glasgow, and three years younger than me, and
a Scorpio, he played the guitar and wrote songs. I became quite friendly with him over the
next year, and remained so for some time.
When he married a girl from a
wealthy family in an English parish church, I read that well-known passage from
St Paul’s
epistle to the Corinthians.
Newcomers
playing minor parts in The Madwoman included Glyn Worsnip as the Street Singer,
and Esther Rantzen as the Flower Girl.
Both were reading English, she at Somerville and he at St John’s College.
Esther was a plump and pushy Jewish girl,
all teeth and smiles and eager for fame. She
attached herself to people who put up with her and seemed to be going
somewhere. Glyn was good-looking, tall
and thin, and was much admired by the queer old Master of St John’s, who was also the leading Freemason
who’d closely embraced Sid and me at our initiation ceremony. Sid later dined with him in St John’s.
At the time, Glyn seemed likely to succeed, as an actor and a
writer. He didn’t, alas, but Esther
did, on TV. He became well known
through his appearances on Esther’s show on BBC TV, That’s Life! After
a lengthy and cruelly destructive illness, multiple system atrophy, he died in
1996, aged 57.
Posing as the Baron in The Madwoman of
Chaillot I greyed my hair, had a moustache and beard (my own), wore a grey
morning suit, a yellow waistcoat, and a carnation as a button-hole. I also had to smoke a cigar, something I had
never done before. At the dress
rehearsal, which inevitably took some time, I puffed away at the cigar and
inhaled, and when I left the stage felt very unwell, giddy and sick. I never smoked a cigar again, merely playing
with one during my performance, and I never inhaled a cigarette.
The production, which ran from Monday, 21
November for a week, was well received by the Oxford reviewers. Don Chapman’s headline was ‘FINE PRODUCTION
BY ETC. He said, ‘Giraudoux’s play,
which satirises power-lust, money-lust and bureaucracy run mad ... uses mordant
wit in the earlier scenes and superficially crazy humour in the later part of
the play … Only a producer and cast of far more than ordinary talents can
adequately express what the author has to say.
Mr Stonehouse and his cast amply fulfil these exacting requirements.’ The new drama critic of Cherwell, Ricky
Shuttleworth, wrote, ‘The piece is very much an argument, concerned not with
human personalities, but with abstract ideas … Such a play needs accomplished
production and acting, and it received both in this production.’ He praised all the leading players and said,
‘Sam Walters, as the President, strode through his scenes with a brash vulgarity,
and force of personality that was life-size plus, without in any way
over-acting. He was admirably
counterpointed by David Senton’s Prospector – sinister, powerful, technically
very accomplished. Gordon Honeycombe
played the third member of the trio, an impecunious, incredulous Baron, who
showed considerable disdain when introduced to the Prospector, as one of
Nature’s gentlemen.’
When waiting in the wings to go on before
the start of Act One, I used to spy on the audience from the prompt corner or
from a gap in the front curtain, humming along with Edith Piaf’s rumbustious
rendition of La Folle, which Bryan Stonehouse used as an overture to the
play. If I was ever in the first scene
of a play I liked to watch the audience settling into their seats and catch the
expectant buzz of their conversations, their subdued excitement adding to mine.
It’s interesting now to reflect that a
year before this my Oxford
career and my life were tending in other directions. And all that actually happened in my last academic
year at Oxford would never have happened if I had not been side-tracked and
made to rest awhile at Pinewood.
Jacques and Measure for Measure, The Waiting of Lester Abbs and
Tamburlaine, and possibly The Miracles, might have been the sum of my dramatic
achievements, and my association with Duncan would never have been strengthened
by the fact that we were both in our third year reading English – an
association that would later on keep me afloat financially and lead to
accidental knock-on effects in my career, which would effect my whole
life. What if I had left Oxford in the summer of
1960 and not, as I did, in the summer of 1961?
Everything would have been very different, inconceivably so. As it was, I did my best acting from The
Madwoman of Chaillot onwards, and was never so busy as in my last year on the
Oxford stage, taking part in seven productions, one of them my own.
Paradise Lost was presented by the ETC in
the Second Week of the Hilary Term in the Pusey House Chapel in St Giles’ from
Tuesday, 24 January, 1961 until the 28th. As there were other university one-day
productions, as well as college productions, during the Oxford year, some thought had to be taken to
ensure that the dates didn’t coincide with them.
Admission was by programme, which I
designed, programmes being bought for 3/6 at the Porter’s Lodge at Univ, or
from Dominick Harrod at Christ
Church, who was the
Business Manager. Sid designed the
costumes and created the masks; his assistant was Meg Rothwell. Trevor Sweetman dealt with the props and the
Front of House Manager was Keith Miles.
I arranged for a female choreographer, Mayotte Magnus, to instruct the
Demons and Angels in movement and gesture.
The Angels and Demons, six of each, were
drawn from former trusty performers in The Miracles, like Bayan Northcott (the
Doctor) Andrew Szepesy (2 Torturer), Till Medinger (2 Shepherd), and Trevor
Sweetman, and from pliant freshmen like John Bush, Richard Bass, David Harrison
and Rory McTurk.
David Grant, son of the whisky distillery owner, arranged that the
extracts from Bruckner’s 9th Symphony, one of my favourite
symphonies, would be heard on loudspeakers positioned along the length of the
Chapel and would not only be localised, as if the sounds were issuing from
Heaven or Hell, but roll from the rear of the chapel to the stage as the sun
rose over Eden, and accompany Adam and Eve as they left Eden, walking hand in
hand down the central aisle into a ground-floor light at the rear of the chapel
and then into the darkness outside.
They had to run back around the chapel and re-enter it for the curtain
call. When God spoke, the recorded
softly spoken voice of Richard Hampton issued from every loudspeaker, thus
seeming to be everywhere around the audience and within their heads.
All the cast, except for Adam and Eve,
wore masks. These were made from
plaster moulded on our faces. Having
plaster covering your face, with holes left leading into your nostrils so that
you could breathe while the plaster set, was a disturbing experience. For a time you were blotted out and ceased
to exist. Mouths and eye-holes were
later cut into the painted masks and hempen, coloured hair attached. Sid, masked, appeared as God on the
rood-screen, along with Christ and six masked Angels. So once again he didn’t speak in a play of
mine as Richard Hampton was the pre-recorded voice of God.
I had read Book 1 of Milton’s Paradise
Lost at school and read the rest of the poem while at Oxford.
I recalled that Milton had originally conceived the idea of
dramatising the story of Satan, Adam ad Eve as a play written in the style of
the ancient Greeks, with masks, movement and a Chorus of Angels and
Demons. There wasn’t enough material in
the poem for Choruses of Angels and Demons, but there were enough speeches by
Satan, Adam and Eve, God and Christ and the Archangels to make a play, and the
events fell naturally into a dramatic progression of scenes. These scenes, in Heaven and Hell and on Earth,
could be coloured and enhanced I felt by symphonic music that was both demonic
and sublime. Only Bruckner’s 9th
Symphony had music of that sort. It was
suggested to me by someone at Oxford
and as soon as I heard it I knew it would be ideal.
I
used the blind figure of Milton as a Prologue, standing alone centre stage in a
black cape, lit from above by a single spotlight, and saying, ‘Of Man’s first
disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought
Death into the world, and all our woe … Sing, heavenly Muse … What in me is
dark illumine, what is low rise and support, that to the highth of this great
argument I may assert eternal providence, and justify the ways of God to
Men.’
As the blind Milton looked up into the light it slowly
faded. What he was imagining was
Satan’s expulsion from Heaven, dramatised by one of the most tremendous
climaxes in Bruckner’s Symphony. God
and Christ and the Angels appeared above in Heaven (on the rood screen) and
judged Satan, casting him into Hell (downstage right). Heaven then vanished, and in the lurid
darkness and flames of Hell below, winged Satan emerged and perched on a rock,
saying, ‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, that we must change for
Heaven … Farewell, happy fields, where joy for ever dwells! Hail horrors! Hail infernal world! And thou profoundest Hell receive thy new
possessor – one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can
make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’
The dramatisation ran for an hour and a
half and, unusually in those days, there was no interval.
Satan was played by David Senton; Milton
by Neil Stacy; Christ by John Watts; Eve by Elizabeth Gordon and Adam by Paul
Rayment. Paul was the weakest
performer. I wanted Adam and Eve to be
small, and like children,
but
although Paul spoke clearly, he lacked charisma as well as stature. He was too ordinary. Elizabeth
was full of the wonder of Paradise as Eve and
of adoration for Adam. They wore white
gauzy garments symbolising innocence and purity. After the Fall they were without make-up and
in rags. The three Archangels descended
from Heaven (the rood screen) via a white staircase. This was quite perilous as the eye-holes of
the masks limited our fields of vision and we were lumbered with large white
wings attached to our backs. Peter
Snow, who was six feet five, was Raphael; I was Gabriel; and Richard
Sherrington was Michael. We must have
looked extraordinary as well as weird.
In a photo I look like an ill and overfed operatic diva in a nightgown
with lank yellow hair (it was made from hemp).
The masks reduced the impact of some
voices, and some mouth-holes had to be enlarged and some actors asked to speak
more strongly. I also watched some
rehearsals from the rear of the chapel to ensure that everyone could be heard
-- and seen.
In the programme I told how Milton, when he was 32,
had developed in a notebook four drafts of a Greek style of tragedy named Adam
Unparadiz’d, which had a Chorus of Angels and such personifications as Justice
and Mercy. He abandoned this scheme,
but nearly 20 years later began writing his epic poem, originally in ten parts,
which was published in 1667. I said
that the poem had over 10,000 lines, that my adaptation was shorter than the
1,189 lines of the poem’s longest book, Book IX, and that although it had none
of the similes, and very little of the narrative, it had all that was dramatic. The words were all Milton’s, transposed, however, in places and
greatly cut.
Bill Tydeman interviewed me for Isis, his article appearing on 18 January 1961. He quoted me as saying, rather immodestly,
‘The aim is Magnificence.’ He
continued, ‘Whatever the final verdict on the performance, Honeycombe himself
is certain that his version will heighten still further the dramatic power of
Milton’s treatment of the story … He has employed the stylisation, musical
effects, and even the masks associated with the Grecian theatre, because they
seem to fit Milton’s majestic verse … Honeycombe is not hesitating to use all
the help that light and sound, rich costumes, and a set with plenty of levels
can give him … He seems determined to give his author a dignified and lavish
treatment … At all events, whatever our opinion of his ideas, we shall be fools
if we stay away. Oxford certainly won’t see anything quite
like this again.’
The first night was on Tuesday, 24 January
at 8.15 pm and the last on Saturday at 5.0 pm.
After it, we had to dismantle the
set and remove all evidence of our activities so that the chapel could be used
for the Sunday morning service. Don
Chapman, writing in the Oxford Mail, ended his review by saying it was ‘an
evening of true Miltonic grandeur.’ He
said, ‘It makes up for its brutal sacrifices of the text by a visual beauty and
an almost hieratic eloquence of diction.’
He commended the ‘powerfully expressive masks, gorgeous costumes, a rich
musical and choral background, deft lighting and a simple but poetic setting.’
Frank Dibb in the Oxford Times said,
‘There can have been few bolder experiments in the field of the theatre than Mr
Honeycombe’s adaptation and compression … of Milton’s leisurely epic … As both
adaptor and producer, he has wisely concentrated his efforts on ensuring that
we hear as much of Milton’s mighty verbal music as possible and has underlined
those passages which have the most dramatic potential with mimetic movement,
which is often very compelling, groupings in Sid Bradley’s often striking
costumes and much powerfully cogent music … Mr Honeycombe has been fortunate in
collecting some of the best speakers in Oxford.’ All the leading actors were praised, in
particular David Senton and Elizabeth Gordon, although Dibb, like others,
thought the voice of God lacked fire and wasn’t sufficiently awesome. I had
in fact asked Richard Hampton, when recording his speeches as God, to speak
softly, so that it would seem as if the audience was hearing his voice, when
played back in the chapel, as if it was all around them.
Piers Plowright, writing in Cherwell, was
also full of praises for the cast and the production, which he said was
‘essentially dramatic, excitingly lit, and with some stunning musical effects.’ Peter Oppenheimer, writing in the Oxford
Magazine about a dress rehearsal that he saw, said the production was
‘unquestionably successful’ and he praised ‘the high standard of individual
performances.’ He had some fun with
the Angels and Demons. He said, ‘The
former (not helped by the lighting which came too much from below, nor by God,
whose disembodied voice emerged from some celestial loudspeaker in the wings)
looked like mummified pastry-cooks, while the latter were altogether too
undisciplined: one was never sure whether they were meant to be fluid or
statuesque … One could not help feeling, incidentally, that everybody would
have been happier without masks.’
This was the first production I had directed
and produced on my own. I’d moved away
from the controlling influence of Duncan
and had proved, to myself and others, that I had enough creative energies and
ideas to be capable of directing a play.
As a director I was concerned with meaning, mood, interpretation,
clarity and pace. I was attuned to
vocal and theatrical effects and to the dramatic use of light and sound. And I talked to the actors, discussed their
parts and asked them what they thought.
The following week it was straight into
rehearsals for Richard II, which OUDS presented in the Playhouse from 22
February, 1961, for ten days. Richard
Hampton, now President of OUDS, who would play the king, had asked Michael
Croft, founder and director of the Youth Theatre Company, to direct the play,
having been Hamlet in a YTC production directed by Croft before he came to
Univ. Croft was about 38 and had been a
teacher at Alleyn’s School in London. He was a tough and forceful but humourous
man, and antagonised some people.
Several of the cast dropped out, dissatisfied with the parts offered to
them and with Croft’s blunt language and no-nonsense attitude. He thought of Richard II as ‘a pageant of
words’ ‘a kind of symphony’ and likened his function as the director to that of
the conductor of an orchestra. He said, ‘I don’t approve of production with a
capital P. I want to show what the play
means, and I am aiming primarily at clarity and directness.’
There was a permanent set of a stepped
platform stage and three raised arches approached on either side by ramps. It was designed by John Bury. The historically accurate costumes were
hired from the Old Vic.
David Senton was John of Gaunt; Neil Stacy
the Duke of York; Richard Sherrington was Bolingbroke; Peter Snow the Duke of
Northumberland; and Ian McCulloch was his son, Henry Percy, otherwise known as
Hotspur. Also in the cast, from Univ,
were John Duncan as a shambling Geordie Gardener, and myself as the Bishop of
Carlisle.
Though once again hiding behind a short
beard and a moustache, and wearing red robes, a pectoral cross and rings, I
wasn’t happy with the part. There was
little to say or do, apart from a couple of admonitory speeches and an
emotional outburst in Act IV Scene 1 in Westminster Hall, when I protested at
Bolingbroke ascending the throne.
‘Marry, God forbid!’ I cried, and ended 34 passionate lines later with a
very awkward couplet, ‘Prevent, resist it, let it not be so, lest child,
child’s children, cry against you woe!’
Whereupon at every performance I was upstaged by Peter Snow’s
business-like Northumberland, who briskly said, ‘Well have you argued, sir. And for
your pains of capital treason we arrest you here.’ It may or may not be significant that an
uncle of Peter was a bishop, his father an army officer, and a grandfather was
a general in WW1. Peter himself had
quite a military mien and voice.
In 1984, Michael Croft remembered this
production of Richard II ‘for two distinctive performances by two
extraordinarily tall actors, both about six feet five.’ He said, ‘Peter Snow played Northumberland
and Gordon Honeycombe the Bishop of Carlisle.
Peter was master of the theatrical send-up. He found it impossible to treat any line or
situation seriously. He wore forever the bemused air of a man who
has not the slightest interest in the proceedings taking place before him. Even in the poignant moments when Richard is
dragged away to Pomfret
Castle, Peter could not
resist looking quizzically down at the Queen’s sorrow-stricken
ladies-in-waiting as though he would like to date them. But he preserved his major send-up for the
Bishop of Carlisle. Something about the
Bishop, or about Gordon’s performance, or his melancholy appearance, fascinated
Peter so that, even during the longeurs of Flint Castle
and Westminster Hall, his gaze continually turned upon Gordon as though he had,
as it were, failed to do up his ecclesiastical flies. Northumberland’s comment outside Flint Castle
on hearing that there was a holy man inside with the King – ‘Oh, belike it is
the Bishop of Carlisle’ – caused Peter endless amusement. He spoke it differently at each performance,
changing the emphasis from syllable to syllable and generally conveying the
impression that the Bishop was probably involved in some unusual sexual activity,
possibly with Bushy, Bagot and Green had they been there. Those three characters, in fact, became the
subject of a brilliant calypso devised by Ian McCulloch, who played Percy,
which had the refrain: “Now who was the Queen – Was it Bushy, Bagot, Green – Or
was it one of the pages?”
The Cherwell critic felt that the
production failed because there was no sense of growth in it. He said, ‘We are given a series of tableaux,
often meaningless, because in no way linked to the argument of the play … All
moments of tragedy and grief have to be worked up from scratch.’ However, he thought that the fear behind the
gaiety, the jeers, the mock-heroics of Richard Hampton’s King ‘convinced and
moved me from first to last.’ He said
the acting of Senton and Stacy was ‘first-rate’ and he liked the ‘glittering
eye, ringing voice and curling lip’ of Peter Snow, and ‘Gordon Honeycombe as
the Bishop of Carlisle trembling with suppressed martyrdom.’ Although the critics of The Daily Telegraph
and The Times had a few reservations about the production, they both admired
Richard’s ‘exceptional’ King Richard.
On a Thursday night before the opening of
Richard II, an ETC Cabaret Evening in the Arlosh Hall had been organised by
Esther Rantzen. Sketches were performed
by, among others, Glyn Worsnip, Bill Tydeman, Derek Wood and myself. I played a lawyer prosecuting Peter Pan as
if it were Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The
reviewer in Isis thought it was ‘a very funny
monologue’ which reached its climax in a description of Peter teaching John and
Wendy to fly. I enjoyed what I was
doing, and the laughs that also greeted a short scene in which I scoured the
stage on my hands and knees apparently looking for something I had lost. Someone walked by, paused and looked at me
inquiringly before asking, ‘Is there a problem?’ To which I replied, ‘Pair of dice lost.’
At the end of the Hilary Term I remained
at Oxford, as Richard II had been almost
entirely recast and had to be re-rehearsed before the production went on tour
in France. Nigel Frith, who’d played Bushy, was now
playing Richard II; Douglas Verrall was now the Duke of York; Ian McCulloch was
now both Hotspur and Mowbray; and I was now both the Bishop Carlisle and John
of Gaunt. John Duncan and Barry Porter
from Univ left the company, as did Wendy Varnals as the Duchess of Gloucester,
and Peter Stone came into it as Exton.
Jane Hodlin of St Hugh’s as the Queen, Peter Snow as the Duke of
Northumberland, and Mike Fletcher as Willoughby,
retained their original parts.
I don’t recall who directed the new cast,
nor who came with us to France
in a supervisory capacity – not Michael Croft.
A photograph of the company taken on the steps of SHAPE shows 28 of the
actors and the backstage crew. Peter Snow
is absent, and Jane Hodlin, smartly dressed, is carrying a handbag. All the men wear jackets and ties, apart
from a few who wear cravats. I’m
clean-shaven, no beard. This was to
make my Bishop look as unlike my John of Gaunt as possible. My Gaunt had a grey wig and a stick-on
beard, and of course I had to age myself with make-up, to appear hollow-eyed,
aged and ill. By now I had a useful
collection of sticks of Leichner make-up of ten or so assorted colours, and
powder, plus a powder-puff, to dull the colours and take the sweaty shine off
my face.
The Playhouse production of Richard II had
ended on 4 March. We were in Caen by Saturday, 18 March, which means we must have left London shortly before this, as Caen was our first date. Only two postcards to my mother dealing with
the tour have survived. The first was
written in a café in Montmartre. I told her we had left Caen that morning at 9.0 am after a
performance that ‘was very well received.’
I said we would leave Paris for Lyons – ‘Very sunny but a little cold here in Paris’ – at 6.30 pm. ‘Having a fine time,’ I assured her.
At Lyons,
where we performed on Wednesday, 22 March – ‘Very social reception’ -- I stayed
with the consul-general. Our last
performance, on the Saturday, was in Versailles,
where I stayed with an RAF Group Captain and we visited SHAPE. We returned to London
on the Sunday, and after a few days in Oxford I
was back in Edinburgh
on Wednesday, 29 March.
The second postcard was written at Versailles, on Saturday, 25 March – ‘Weather very warm and
sunny, at the moment am sunning myself at the top of steps in Versailles Park.’ I said that the tour had not been too weary
‘considering all the vins d’honneur we’ve had and hectic sing-songs and card
games between places.’
It was a very convivial tour. We drank a great deal, were very noisy and
fooled around a lot. One night, after
some post-show carousing in a café or restaurant, Ian McCulloch and I were
being ferried by car, the worse for wear, to the homes of our separate
hosts. It was very late, and I asked Ian
to wait in the car in case I couldn’t get in.
As it was, I didn’t have a key
and couldn’t manage to open the garden gate.
I fumbled and mumbled and wailed, ‘Que fais-je!’ This
hugely entertained and amused Ian. ‘Que
fais-je! Que fais-je!’ he yelled,
rolling about on the back seat.
The previous year, on the Measure for
Measure tour, when I had a minor part in the play, I associated with others in
the same situation (apart from Elizabeth Gordon) and didn’t think anything of
this. But this time I became aware that
the Richard II company formed itself unconsciously into hieratic groups –
something that happened, I later discovered, in every film or stage company
with whom I worked. Those playing leading roles socialised
together, as did those playing minor parts, and the women were generally
ignored by the men and socialised with each other.
On this tour the alpha group spent a lot
of spare time together, joked a lot, drank a lot and played contract bridge on
trains – Peter Snow was good at bridge.
He and my other companions in this group were Nigel Frith (the King),
Douglas Verrall (York),
Ian McCulloch (Hotspur) and Richard Sherrington (Bolingbroke). Peter seemed to have friends or relatives in
France
and wasn’t always with us. Nigel had a
loud voice, was jolly, and behaved and looked like an overgrown bouncy
boy. Richard Sherrington was
intelligent and lively company and Douglas I liked – he was from Brasenose –
but I never followed any of these friendships up. All the good times we enjoyed together
became forgotten once we were back at Oxford
and immersed in whatever studies and activities we pursued among those we knew
at our own colleges.
My
pairing up with Douglas was due in part to the
fact that we were both playing old men in Richard II and both were uncles. There is a photo taken in the amphitheatre
of a Roman ruin in Lyons of Douglas Verrall and Richard Sherrington holding me
up as I deliver, histrionically, Gaunt’s famous speech about England. Another photo, taken in the gardens of Versailles, shows me
decked with my college scarf and carrying a giggling Susan Jones. Susan was one of the ladies-in-waiting in
the play and we must have been re-enacting some imagined event in the history
of Versailles.
We made the biggest impression at Lyons, where we performed
twice in the grand and ornate Théâtre de Célestins, once at night and again the
following afternoon. Most of us were
inebriated on the first occasion and probably on the second occasion as
well. The local paper, for whatever
reason, thought the evening performance was ‘très remarquable’. It praised Sherrington, Nigel Frith, Peter
Snow, Ian McCulloch, Douglas Verrall and myself – ‘très émouvant dans Jean de
Gand.’ Another paper
said I had a personal success ‘avec l’agonie très mélodramatiquement appuyée de
Jean de Gand.’ There were many school and
university students in the audience that night, and we could see that they were
following the play in the play scripts they had brought with them, and they
showed their appreciation by applauding some of the famous speeches. In this I accidentally led the way.
We’d had two receptions that day, one at
lunchtime and one about 6.0 pm. As a
result, having downed excessive amounts of free wine and champagne, most of us
were smashed when we dazedly wheeled onto the stage, endeavouring to stop swaying
when we tried to stand still and enunciating overmuch, to compensate for a
tendency to slur our words. In doing so
we tended to shout. At one point in Act
II Scene 1, Nigel Frith, who was haranguing me, suddenly stopped speaking. He had dried. He stared at me and I at him, and nothing
more would have happened had not the prompter provided Nigel with a cue. Unfortunately, when Nigel came out of his
coma and carried on, he contrived to cut about two pages of the script, and the
rest of us floundered verbally until we caught up with him.
Just
before this, made uneasy by the peculiar diction and actions of some of the
cast on the stage, and liberated by the champagne that freed my inhibitions and
my tongue, when it came to me saying Gaunt’s prophetic, dying speech about
England – ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, this earth of
majesty,’ etc, I tottered down to the footlights and, centre stage, to the
amazement of the rest of the cast, I declaimed the whole speech at the
audience, like an aria, with increasing passion and volume, ending fortissimo, with
‘That England, that was wont to conquer others, hath made a shameful conquest
of itself! Ah, would the scandal vanish
with my life, how happy then were my ensuing death!’ Out of breath and coughing – for real -- I
staggered upstage to tumultuous applause.
As I passed Peter Snow, he whispered, loudly, ‘Well done, Gordon!’
I then had to turn into the Bishop of
Carlisle. But having wrecked my voice, I
croaked my way through the rest of the play and had no passion or volume left
for the Bishop’s big speech in Act IV.
After Lyons
it was up to Versailles, and then back to England and up to Edinburgh before the end of the month.
I returned to Oxford
a week later to begin my last term at Oxford
and to prepare for the Finals Exams for my English degree. Some preparation would have been done, some
concentrated studying, including the perusal of previous Exam papers to see
what sort of questions were likely to be asked. Once again I returned to Oxford well before term began, on 23 April,
as I was involved in another production, and in this one I played the lead.
Saint’s Day, written by John Whiting, had
won a drama competition held during the Festival of Britain in 1951, and had
been staged in the Arts Theatre in London in September that year. It
baffled the critics and didn’t do very well.
A later play of his, The Devils, had been premiered by the RSC (the
Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Aldwych Theatre in February 1961, with
Dorothy Tutin, Richard Johnson and Diana Rigg in the leading roles. It must have been this production that gave
Michael Brunson the idea of directing Whiting’s first award-winning but
neglected work. Brunson, who was
studying theology at Queen’s College, was only 20 at the time. He wore glasses and looked studious and
schoolmasterly. In later years he would
become the political editor at ITN.
I was cast as Paul Southman, a philosopher
and writer who lived with his grand-daughter, Stella and her younger artist
husband, Charles Heberden, in the country.
Southman was 82 – I was 24 – so I had to devise a very ageing make-up
and characterisation, and become much more aged and infirm than John of
Gaunt. This involved altering my voice
and posture, letting my hair grow and powdering it so that it matched an untidy
(false) grey beard and moustache, and wearing slippers, a rumpled suit and a
woollen scarf. The play, which was set
on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 25 January (also Southman’s
birthday) seemed to make sense at the time.
But the obscure metaphorical elements don’t gel very well now.
The people in the nearby village are
antagonistic for some reason and the Heberden marriage is in trouble. A poet, Robert Procathren, arrives to take
Southman to a celebratory dinner. Then
three threatening soldiers, who’ve escaped from a military prison, invade the
house. Procathren accidentally shoots
Stella and teams up with the soldiers, who set fire to the village and take Paul
Southman and Heberden away to be executed, shot. No doubt Brunson understood the meaning of
all this violence – if not the audience.
I think the local vicar and his church were also set on fire.
It
was a long play, lasting almost three hours, which included two intervals of
ten minutes each.
Saint’s Day was presented by the ETC in
the Playhouse at 5.0 and 8.15 pm on Sunday, 30 April, 1961. Sam Walters was still President of the ETC,
Esther was still the Secretary, and Richard Sherrington, John Watts and Brunson
were on the Committee, along with Juliet Curtis, who played Southman’s
grand-daughter. As usual, some of the
cast had assumed different names in the programme to mislead their tutors.
Whether it was because I was playing the
lead or because of the role I was playing I distanced myself from the others in
the cast. I didn’t associate with them,
apart from at rehearsals and even then not much.
The
reviews were as confused as those in 1951.
The Guardian’s reviewer said the play was ‘a strange and disturbing but
eventually unsatisfactory play’ and that its theme was approached ‘on an
intellectual level with the result that we are always interested but rarely
involved … The writing is literary rather than dramatic.’ He concluded, ‘At the centre of the play is
the character of the aged poet, Paul Southman, and Gordon Honeycombe’s was a
sensitive and intelligent performance; but it is in the nature of the play that
we should not be moved by his destruction.’
Don Chapman in the Oxford Mail said, ‘Mr Whiting treats the events in an
oblique, elliptical fashion with many cross-currents … The cast … was very ably led by Gordon Honeycombe, with
good support from Jeff Milland and Richard Sherrington.’ Cherwell said that the cast was ‘predominantly
excellent’ and that my playing of a reclusive, cynical poet on the verge of
senility, was ‘sensitive and attractive and most of all authoritative.’
Mark Amory in Isis
wrote, ‘Amusing, moving or frightening, if thought of in detail, as a whole the
play seemed muddled and muddling.’ He
said, ‘The violence is less effective than the threat of violence. Fear threads its way through the play, from
the fear of the old man that he will make a fool of himself at a dinner given
in his honour, to the fear of death felt by the young painter. Fear of the unknown, fear of the villagers,
fear of criticism, sometimes admitted, sometimes denied, the theme is ever
present.’ He concluded, ‘All the main
parts were acted excellently … In fact it was the one of the best acted and
produced plays I have seen in Oxford. Gordon Honeycombe aged sixty years, which is
hard, and conveyed that he had been a talented poet, which is harder. The angry ineffective movements of his
hands, the sudden arrogance of obstinacy in his shoulders, the rambling,
mumbling audible voice were all brilliantly conveyed in a performance both
forceful and restrained.’
It was very gratifying to receive such
praise. All the acting I had done at Oxford climaxed in this
part, in the last term of my time there.
After the show, John Whiting, who had been in the audience, came
backstage. I can’t recall what he was
like or what he said. No doubt it was
something like ‘Well done.’
Three
years later Whiting died of cancer.
Some 40 years later, in 2002, Sam Walters, President of the ETC in 1961,
would direct a production of Saint’s Day at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.
Finals was now upon me, and I had to sit
in the Examination Schools in the High Street, in a large room, with about 60
others, who included John Duncan, Richard Hampton and Valerie Karn, and deal
with the set papers for the English exam, which began on Thursday, 8 June. We sat at separate desks, the men in the
sub-fusc of suits, white shirts and white bow-ties. We had three hours to answer the questions
posed in each paper, and we had to write a three-hour essay on one of three
topics. The English exam covered four days, and at the
end of them we gathered outside the building, with second or other third year
chums, who were doing different exams on different days, and popped the corks
of champagne bottles and shared the contents, drinking on the High Street
pavement while discussing the questions in the papers and our answers. Pete Hudson and Keith Jones and others from
Univ joined Duncan and I and Valerie Karn.
It was the traditional way to celebrate the conclusion of three years of
study and the end of our time at Oxford.
It felt strange – I felt strange. What next?
Once again I was facing the Great
Unknown. I had applied for no jobs, as others had done,
nor had I applied for a teacher’s training course or presented myself at the
Appointments Board. I had no idea what
I would do, or should do. I only knew I
didn’t want to be a teacher, or work from 9 to 5.
There was, however, one more production of
a play to occupy me before I left the known and comfortable environment of Oxford and there was the
Univ Commemoration Ball on Tuesday, 20 June, 1961, which had been organised by
a committed headed by Sid. He had
designed and hand-written the official ten-page programme all by himself. The comical coloured illustrations that
appeared on most pages were also drawn and painted by him. It must have taken him many laborious hours
to complete. Years later I would tell
him he should have been a writer and illustrator of childrens’ books. But he
was bent on being an academic, an English lecturer concentrating on Anglo-Saxon
and medieval studies. In due course his monumental translation of
all the extant Old English poems, with an introduction and headnotes, replaced
RK Gordon’s Anglo-Saxon Poetry, which we had used at Oxford.
It was published by Dent in Everyman’s Library in 1982.
The Univ Commemoration Ball was much more
lavish and lasted longer than a Summer Ball.
It began at 10.0 pm and ended with breakfast in the Fellows’ Garden at
6.15 am. There were three areas for
dancing, in the Radcliffe Quad, in the Main Quad and in the Hall. The first two areas had raised wooden dance
floors on the grass. In the Front Quad
were Sid Phillips and his band, a clown (from 1.0 am) and a Piper (off and on
from 1.30 am). George Browne and his
band and the Barbados Steel Band alternated between the two Quads throughout
the night. The University Jazz Band
played in the Hall, where there was also a Buffet. There
were Champagne Suppers, a Barbecue and a Mead Bar in the Master’s Garden, a Beer Garden
in the Fellows’ Garden, and cabaret turns in the Beer Cellar. Toilets
for gentlemen were marked with an X on a programme map that showed all the
dance and other locations. Ladies had a
separate cloakroom. Those seeking
pleasures other than drinking and dancing could make use of their own rooms or
the rooms of a friend, or hire a punt for waterborne romancing, or drift down
the Cherwell drinking champagne and eating strawberries as the next day dawned.
On this occasion I didn’t have a partner
and instead attached myself to other couples and danced with the girls I knew,
like Valerie Karn and Meg Rothwell.
Other colleges also had balls at the end of the Trinity Term – Ball
committees met to make sure that dates didn’t clash -- and although they were
enjoyable there was an air of finality to these jollities, especially at the
end of one’s third year. The balls
marked the end of one’s carefree youth.
Adult responsibilities loomed – and work, real work.
The 113th major production of
the OUDS, The Shoemakers’ Holiday, a ‘pleasant
comedy’ by Thomas Dekker, was staged in the Cloister of Wadham College in
Eighth Week. It was directed by David
Webster, who had once been active in OUDS and was no longer at Oxford, and had
a huge cast that included virtually all the leading Oxford actors, like David
Senton, who was now President of OUDS, Sam Walters, Oliver Davies, Richard
Sherrington, Neil Stacy and Wendy Varnals.
Newcomers included Giles Block, Nancy Lane and Sheridan Morley. Those from Univ in minor roles were Keith
Miles, Andrew Szepesy, John Watts and Stephen Cockburn, and in the mob of extras,
posing as shoemakers, courtiers, huntsmen, soldiers and citizens were Nigel
Frith and Michael Brunson, John Duncan, Richard Hampton and myself.
It was a popular success, and as I stood among
the extras, a mere face in the crowd, cheering events on stage, I was faintly
aware that this was indicative of my lot when my time at Oxford was over.
Frank Dibb, in the Oxford Times, said that
David Webster ‘handled a large cast of varying degrees of talent with skill and
sympathy and there were several performances of the type required for a
successful alfresco account of a broad-humoured play such as this.’ This he wrote in what amounted to a
half-yearly report on the various plays presented in Oxford in the last six
months, including those put on by city and county drama societies. In his mention of Richard II, Saint’s Day
and Paradise Lost he praised my performances and said of Paradise Lost that the
production gave him the greatest lasting pleasure. He said, ‘Mr Honeycombe in the triple role
of adaptor, producer and player of Gabriel and aided by Sid Bradley’s
compelling costumes, ensured that the magnificent sonority of Milton’s language was given its full relish
and point. Mr Honeycombe, who next term
will be missed from the councils of University drama, was also given vivid
support by the vocal consort ranged alongside him.’
It was a valediction not dissimilar from
that given by the Rector when I left the Academy. Not that it meant very much to me at the
time, as the show wasn’t over as far as Oxford
acting was concerned. For John Duncan
had asked me to join the cast of a play he was directing for the Oxford Theatre
Group, for the OTG’s ninth successive appearance on the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe. We rehearsed initially in Oxford before travelling up to Edinburgh.
It
must have been about then that Sid and I moved out of 63 St John Street, he to stay with his
mother, as I did with mine.
The play was a new one by a young author,
who’d already attracted attention with his first two novels, At Fever Pitch and
Comrade Jacob. It was called Songs for
an Autumn Rifle and the author, now a very young Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, was my one-time co-star in the first two plays I
had appeared in at the Edinburgh
Academy, David Caute.
Songs
was staged at the Cranston Street Hall, in the lower stretch of the Royal Mile
below John Knox’s House and east of Waverley Station. The masonic hall had seats for 230 people
and the most basic accommodation for the cast.
I stayed at Craiglockhart
Road.
The content of the play centred on the
moral dilemmas facing a Communist newspaper editor in England at the time of the
Hungarian Revolution and Suez, its action switching from battle-scarred Hungary
to the newspaper’s London office, while the editor’s son faced imprisonment or
death as a National Serviceman ordered against his will to take part in the
assault on Suez. The newspaper was
called Onward.
Oliver Davies played the editor; Pete
Hudson was his son; Sam Walters was the local Communist boss and Romola
Christopherson his daughter. Ian
McCulloch was a leader of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters; Nigel Frith was a
Soviet soldier and I was a Soviet sergeant called Dementiev. Peter Snow had one scene as, appropriately,
a very British officer questioning the son.
Songs for an Autumn Rifle played nightly
at 7.30 pm, with two matinees, from 22 August to 9 September 1961. Tickets were priced at 5/6 and 3/6. It was followed at 10.30 pm by the OTG
Revue, Late Night Final, which featured John Wells, Glyn Worsnip, Jonathan
Cecil and Giles Havergal and three girls.
One night the Revue was graced by a guest
appearance by Albert Finney, who was at the Festival in John Osborne’s play,
Luther. He came onto the stage,
squatted and seemed to be having trouble with his bowels. Someone wandered on, stopped on seeing
Finney, and inquired, ‘Tighter?’ ‘No,’
he replied. ‘Luther.’
In the Cranston Street Hall the front row of
the audience was about three feet away from the stage. During Songs for an Autumn Rifle the loud
and explosive noises of the Hungarian Revolution offstage were repeated by the heated
arguments and much shouting onstage, as well as some violence – I roughed up
Ian McCulloch and rammed my rifle up between his legs. All this in close proximity made more of an
impression on the critics than the play.
Headlines of the reviews read – ‘No Meat Among The Mayhem, Oxford
Group’s play is a strain on the audience’ – ‘Vigorous impact on the ears, not
the mind’ – ‘This is fierce violent drama’ – ‘Rifle Song is a Ballad of
Blood.’ The Times said, ‘Mr Caute’s
play is packed with contentious political matter and it unpacks itself on our
heads with the clatter and dust of a lorry pouring out a load of bricks.’
The Scotsman complained, ‘Everybody in the
cast either mumbled or shouted like mad, and nearly everyone interrupted
everybody else. Every second minute
this frightful caterwauling burst out, “Listen.
What are you saying? Listen! Do you say that? You say that, do you? Listen to me. Listen!”
Mr John Duncan has an obsession with noise and if by chance the author
has cheated him of his opportunity for interruption by writing a long speech,
it will be accompanied by gunfire, or a typewriter or, when all else fails, by
an electric razor. I do not
exaggerate. The noise is frightful and
continuous. There is also much slapping
of faces, pummelling of backs, throwing down of firearms and gouts of blood.’
In one scene the blood was real. As the Russian sergeant I accidentally
struck Ian McCulloch with my rifle in his face. The Evening Despatch reported that Ian, whom
the paper called Ken, ‘had to go to the Royal Infirmary out-patients department
late last night with a split lip after a stage fight between partisans and
Russian soldiers. Ken played on with
blood streaming from his mouth until the end of the scene.’
The reviews weren’t all bad, and most of us
received some praise, in particular Oliver Davies and Sam Walters. The Evening Despatch said, ‘This is a
gripping play about the real dilemmas of real people, acted by a highly
competent cast’ and that it was ‘a must.’
My performance as the Russian sergeant was commended in several reviews,
and the Daily Express replied to the put-downs of the Bishop of Carlisle by the
Northumberland of Peter Snow by saying that Gordon Honeycombe was ‘quite
perfectly an intelligence officer (brilliant work!)’
We used to wind down after the show in the
cast’s digs, drinking cheap wine, or beer, and smoking. Ian sometimes played his guitar and sang,
dolefully and dreamily. One song he
wrote was a peace-lover’s lament, with the opening words, ‘I want a man I can
rely on … I want a man and not a lion … Why must men fight …?’
It was at this time that CND, the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament, which had started in 1958 with marches from
Aldermaston to London
over Easter – over 100,000 people attended a rally in Trafalgar Square in 1960 – reached a peak
with a mass sit-down in the Square on 17 September 1961. Over 1,000 people were arrested and fined
twenty shillings each. Among the
peaceniks of the liberal left were several writers, actors, playwrights and
stage directors, including John Osborne, Mary Ure, Kingsley Martin, Arnold
Wesker, Lindsay Anderson and Vanessa Redgrave.
Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister then, and Kennedy was President of
the USA.
After Songs for an Autumn Rifle ended,
living with my mother, jobless, and with no prospect of a job, was difficult
for us both. She was no longer the
lively Louie of Karachi, or the merry mother.
With her swollen arm and skimpy dyed black hair she continued to
embarrass me. She cared for me, but I
didn’t care for her. I was
self-obsessed, taciturn and withdrawn.
The rooms my mother had in Mrs McCallan’s
house in Craiglockhart Road consisted of a bedroom, a living-room, a shared
bathroom and kitchen, and the use of a guest bedroom when I was there. It was dispiriting and no place to entertain
any of my school-friends. I doubt I saw
any of them. For they were getting on
with their lives and I was going nowhere. I had
to do something, to earn a living – but what?
I imagine I got out of the house as often as possible, went to the
cinema, visited Marion and probably Danny Penman, and busied myself by seeing
what if any references there were to any Honeycombes in parish registers and
other books in the Central Library and the National Library in George IV Bridge
off the High Street. I continued to
ignore the genealogy of the Frasers, although I did obtain some birth, death
and marriage certificates of my immediate Fraser family.
Apart from certificates dealing with the
Honeycombes in Bridge of Allan, I found a family of Honeycombes in Glasgow. A George Honeycombe, who was born in Jersey in 1852, had fathered eight children including
four boys, three of whom died when very young, the only survivor – he was with
the Royal Scots -- being killed in WW1.
George, who died in 1901, had received next to no education and had no
trade. He was, in turn, a seaman in the
merchant navy, a coppersmith’s labourer, a steamship lamp trimmer, a general
labourer, a cheese merchant’s porter, a railway storeman, and a cricket club
groundsman. George had to get work to
support himself and his family. He had
to make a living. So had I – but
how? I expect I was able to survive in
the cheerless months that followed the end of my full-time education by the depleting
supply of money I had saved from my months with Radio Hong Kong, and by the few
pounds my mother gave me.
In August the results of my Final Exams in
English had been published in The Times.
The ‘Oxford Class Lists: English Language and Literature’ revealed that
‘RG Honeycombe, Univ and Edinburgh Acad,’ had got a Second. I later heard that it was what was called a
good Second. Duncan got a Third and Richard Hampton a
Fourth. Only ten of the many reading
English at Oxford
that year got a First. I was officially
now a Bachelor of Arts, and my mother’s faith in me had been vindicated. This would have pleased her. She began adding BA to my name on envelopes
when she wrote to me.
By staying on the books of the college and
paying £12, I was able five years later to pick up my MA, my Master of Arts
degree. This I did on 29 October 1966
at the Sheldonian Theatre, after standing in line and being tapped on the head
by a bible. Sid received his MA at the
same time. In the audience were his
Danish wife, Mette, and AD, my Aunt Donny.
Meanwhile, in 1961 in Bournemouth,
AD had left Hurlingham House and moved back into the Anglo-Swiss Hotel, where
she paid £8 a week for a room. She had
come up to Oxford to see Paradise Lost and
Richard II My Great-Aunt Mem was now
in a convalescent home in Northfleet in Kent, where she had been brought
up, as had my grandfather, Henry.
During the summer months of 1961 AD was in Scotland,
based in Edinburgh, where she stayed with her
cousin, Eleanor, and her husband, while visiting friends in the Stirling area
and touring Scotland. She met up with me, my mother, Marion and
Jim and their two children, but I don’t think she came to see me perform with
the OTG. I may have warned her off
seeing the play, assuming that it was not something she would have
enjoyed.
After she had returned to the Anglo-Swiss
Hotel at the end of September, 1961, about the time of my 25th
birthday, she drove up to Oxford
in October to see me graduate and receive my BA English degree. My mother journeyed down to Oxford for this ceremony and stayed with AD
in the Mitre Hotel. I had dinner there
with them both. AD wrote in her
Memories, ‘The following morning Louie and I were both pleased and proud to be
attending the graduation ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre. Gordon was the first of his family to
receive an Oxford
degree.’ Afterwards, I showed them around Univ and
pointed out the rooms which had been mine.
My mother must have been immensely gratified, after getting me educated
at the Academy and then at Oxford,
by my successes at both. My BA would
have meant much more to her than to me.
Actually I wasn’t the first Honeycombe to
get an Oxford
degree. Benjamin Honeycombe preceded me
by some 250 years. Born in Cornwall,
Benjamin was at Exeter
College, where he
matriculated in April 1704 when he was 17.
He was studying theology and became a BA in January 1709 and an MA two
years later. He married and had eight
children and was Rector of Weare Giffard in Devon
for 24 years, dying in 1735, aged 57.
His eldest son, John, was also at Exeter College,
matriculating in 1737 when he was 16.
He was Rector of East Buckland and Filleigh in Devon
and died, aged 30 and unmarried, in 1746.
By the time of the BA graduation ceremony
in Oxford I had
already been there for several weeks. I
probably left Edinburgh
immediately after my birthday, which may have been celebrated by a high tea in
my sister’s home. I moved into a flat
in a house in east Oxford,
off the Headington or Cowley Roads, which I shared with two freshmen. They were aged 18 or 19 and were
Northerners, and the surname of one of them was Machin. Neither of them was very tall. At the time some cartoon characters were
appearing in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, The Huckleberry Hound Show,
which ran from 1958 to 1962. In the
cartoons were two mice, called Pixie and Dixie,
who inhabited a house with a tall brown cat called Mr Jinks. I of course became Jinksy and the other two
were Pixie and Dixie, which might explain why
I can’t remember their real names. Mr
Jinks had a catch-phrase – ‘I hates those meeces to pieces!’ But in fact we all got on quite well.
How I happened to move in with them I
don’t remember. Perhaps Univ advised me
about this, about somewhere to stay.
Pixie and Dixie were unknown to me, and
it was odd living in a house with strangers and having, for the first time, to
make my own breakfast and find my own meals, and deal with domestic
matters. I’d become used to this, to
some extent, in Hong Kong. But this was how every civilian lived, and
how I would live from now on, fending for myself, initially without the
financial support of a job. And so,
sitting in that cold flat on the other side of the Cherwell I began writing
another play, using my father’s Remington typewriter and making carbon copies,
and no doubt I also read through and revised what I’d already written.
Periodically I wandered into Univ and saw
Sid, intruding on his studies. But as I
was no longer part of the college scene I felt awkward about making use of the
JCR and the Library. Nonetheless I
attended the Freshers’ NIght in the Beer Cellar and socialised occasionally
with Pixie and Dixie and met up with those
undergrads I liked who were now in their second and third years. As the college’s former leading actor I was
still interested in the activities of Univ Players, and in discussing their
next venture conceived the idea of directing a production of The Long and the
Short and the Tall, one performance of which would be in Oxford Prison. Where
that idea came from I’ve no idea. But it would be a challenging and novel thing
to do. John Bush, Richard Bass, and Nick Owen were to
be three of the soldiers in the play.
Sid was now in rooms in the Almshouses in Kybald Street at
the rear of the college, still studying for his B.Litt. The building had recently been bought by the
college and converted into students’ rooms.
He used to get impatient with me for imposing on his time, and was
reluctant to go out for meals, for a drink and to the cinema. Once
when I visited him he didn’t say anything when I spoke to him, nor did he look
at me, maintaining his dumb and very provoking indifference for over an
hour. He thought it reprehensible of me to be idling
about and not getting a job. All I was
doing was writing a play and rehearsing for yet another one, Pantagleize, and
I’m sure he thought, and said, that I was wasting my time.
I never finished the play I was writing –
whatever it was about – but in the ETC production of Pantagleize that was
staged in October 1961 I received the best reviews I had ever had.
The man who wrote Pantagleize, Michel de
Ghelderode, was an avant-garde Belgian playwright, born in 1898, who wrote more
than 60 plays, 100 stories and 20,000 letters, filling his plays with clownish,
grotesque and savage events and people, as well as puppets, devils and
masks. I knew nothing of this at the time. As it happens, he died the year after the ETC
production was staged, in 1962. The cast included Ian Davidson, John Watts, Nancy Lane, Joe
Durden-Smith (who had been a demon in Paradise Lost), with Oliver Davies as the
eponymous hero, and Sheridan Morley as a Bank Manager. It was directed by Henry Fenwick. The
play was in three acts and had two intervals.
It was staged in the Playhouse for three nights, from Thursday, 19
October and was followed, from the 24th, by a professional
production of The Oresteia of Aeschylus directed by Minos Volankis and
featuring Catherine Lacey, Yvonne Mitchell, Ronald Lewis and Joss Ackland.
The first half of the week, from the 16th,
was taken up by Murder and Mozart -- ‘An Evening of Dramatic Poetry and Chamber
Music’ arranged by Nevill Coghill and featuring Coghill, Peter Bayley and some
other dons – a self-indulgent exercise, which didn’t get much of an audience.
As I wasn’t officially a student at Oxford any more, or even
studying, I didn’t associate much with the other actors during the rehearsals
for Pantagleize. I was, besides, older
than all of them. But being in this
production gave me something to do and took my mind of what I should be doing,
ie, finding a job. What the play was
about was a mystery. However, the
crazy, zany, ridiculous elements in it gave me the idea of basing the character
I was asked to play, McBoom, a general, on The Goon Show’s Major Bloodnok. And although I didn’t appear in many scenes,
what I did when on stage and how I sounded and looked, with a false moustache
and red face, produced much laughter. When playing a comic character I found that I
didn’t really hear the laughter, although I was aware of it. For I was inside the part and concentrating
on that and on the other people on the stage.
The Oxford Magazine’s reviewer said of the
play, ‘It is foreign, rarely acted, fantastic in conception, expressionist in
technique, liberal in outlook, too long and very boring. I am glad to have seen it once, and hope
never to see it again. The hero is a
virtuous but feeble-minded philosopher who becomes quite by accident the key-figure
in a political revolution … Of the supporting cast Gordon Honeycombe got the
most laughs with a Beyond-the-Fringe type sketch of a stupid and cowardly
general.’ The Daily Telegraph reviewer
said, ‘Gordon Honeycombe gave a memorably funny performance as a Continental
general of the old school.’ Frank Dibb
said my ‘blimp-faced General was an unfailing delight,’ and Don Chapman said
‘What can be salvaged of the play is in a glorious performance as General
McBoom by Gordon Honeycombe, the only actor who is completely in sympathy with
his author.’ And Peter Fiddick, writing
in Cherwell, said that McBoom was ‘a rich comic creation which draws from
Gordon Honeycombe the funniest farce performance you are likely to see in Oxford this year.’
I wonder now why nobody ever said I should
become an actor and be trained as such at a drama school, like RADA. Perhaps they did, and if they did, I would
have waved the idea away, as acting to me was a hobby, an enjoyable pursuit,
but not to be pursued professionally.
Besides, it would mean going back to school, albeit a drama school, and
after the Academy, National Service and Oxford
I’d had enough of being instructed and told what to do. But what else was there, apart from doing a
B.Litt or being a teacher, and even that meant more studying to obtain a
Diploma of Education? I didn’t have a
high regard for the teacher’s profession, agreeing with Bernard Shaw’s dictum
-- ‘He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.’ Besides, I thought of myself as a
writer. Had I not been writing
practically all my life, since I was a child?
Then
something happened that put a stop to my writing. It also meant that I abandoned the
production of The Long and the Short and the Tall and that I never auditioned
for the OUDS major in the Hilary Term of 1962 – Peter Dews was going to direct
Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. If I had, I
might have played the King. The fickle
finger of fate pointed me away from Oxford and I
never saw Pixie and Dixie again.
What happened was that I got a letter that
October from John Duncan in London that pulled
me out of Oxford,
provided me with a paid job and turned me into a professional actor. He asked me to join a touring company called
Tomorrow’s Audience, which he’d set up with Richard Ingrams.
11. LONDON and TOMORROW’S AUDIENCE,
1961-62
Tomorrow’s Audience was a production
company set up ‘to initiate and foster an enjoyable and lasting interest in
literature and drama, particularly amongst schoolchildren, and also amongst
people of all ages who have little access to them outside the library and
classroom.’
The company’s first production – it was
financed by Ingrams -- was a dramatised anthology called The Prisoners, which
he and Duncan had put together, using dramatised extracts from novels, plays
and poems concerning men who’d been prisoners or were in prison. They thought of The Prisoners as
‘educational entertainment.’ The
material was linked by a prison warder, who in effect introduced each scene, of
which there were 14 in all. Nothing was
read; everything was acted. There was a token setting made up of portable
screens; costumes and accessories were basic, being sufficient to suggest a
period or identify a character. Tours
were planned that would take in schools and institutions all over England, and
eventually, once the company had become established, as well as a touring
circuit, Ingrams and Duncan hoped to create other programmes, such as The Ranker
at War and Protest.
The company had a General Manager, Peter
Rawley, a Production Assistant, Mary Morgan (whom Ingrams would marry the
following year) and a cast of six – myself, Alan Bennion, Timothy Harley,
Bernard Shine, Michael Kilgariff and Patricia Leventon. It was daunting for me to perform for the
first time with professional actors – and I had to become a member of the
actors’ union, Equity, straightaway – but I found that they were no better or worse
than me, were friendly, and had similar uncertainties about learning and
remembering the words, about characterisations and costumes.
We rehearsed in the Ingrams family’s home,
a large town-house at 18 Cheyne Row in Chelsea. His parents, and a brother – he had three –
lived there, and his mother brought us refreshments, tea and biscuits, but
didn’t, I think, provide meals. I had
to find somewhere to live in London, before I left Oxford, and on a visit to
meet Duncan, Ingrams and the rest of the cast, was able to find quite classy
accommodation in Knightsbridge, for ‘three gentlemen sharing’, in a flat at the
top of a house occupied by the Swedish consul and his wife at 25 Brompton
Square. Here I was joined by John
Duncan and Andrew Osmond – and witnessed the birth of Private Eye.
While at Shrewsbury School
in the mid-1950s, Ingrams had edited a school magazine with Christopher Booker,
Willie Rushton and Paul Foot. At Oxford the same team put
together a magazine called Parson’s Pleasure.
When they left Oxford, in the summer of 1961, they decided to launch
another so-called satirical magazine, financed by Andrew Osmond, which was
basically, like the earlier magazines, a vehicle for silly jokes, parodies and
spoofs, illustrated and designed by Willie Rushton. The first editor was Christopher
Booker. Ingrams took over in 1963.
Private Eye was launched in October
1961. The first copies were a scissors
and paste job printed on paper with a bilious yellow hue. The pages were typed on three IBM Executive
typewriters, in various fonts. Some of
those first jaundiced copies were assembled by Andrew Osmond, Peter Usborne and
Ingrams, with the help of Mary Morgan and Danae Brook, on the floor of the
living-room of our top-floor flat in Brompton
Square.
They were taken away by Osmond and Usborne to be distributed among any
stationers who would have them.
Eventually they struck a deal with WH Smith and were backed financially
by Peter Cook and Nicholas Luard, who ran a new Soho
nightclub, The Establishment, which specialised in comedy, satire and jazz.
Apart from rehearsing in Cheyne Row and
being a spectator at the putting together of Private Eye, I was acclimatising
myself to living in London and sharing a bedroom
with Duncan. Osmond had commandeered the only single
bedroom in the flat. Living in
Knightsbridge meant that there were many places for eating out, and pubs for a
drink, and Tube and bus transport were easily accessible for journeys all over London. The flat in Brompton Square was in effect a place we
just used for bed and breakfast. We
were out every evening, though seldom together, and busy during the day. The only drawback, from my point of view,
was that Duncan
sometimes snored. Not horribly, but
enough to wake me up and keep me awake.
When provoked by this I banged a book on a table, or clapped my hands,
or threw a slipper at him. Whereupon he
would throw it back.
Before long Osmond moved out and his place
was taken by a stranger who answered my ad, a photographer, Michael Hedgecoe. We weren’t at Brompton Square for very long, and over
the next three months or so Duncan and I were often away with Tomorrow’s
Audience.
The company first took the stage on
Friday, 10 November 1961 at the Marlborough Hall, Wimbledon. This event was witnessed by a journalist
from the actors’ weekly newspaper, The Stage.
He wrote, ‘At least three-quarters of the
audience, a larger one that one might have expected on a very wet night, was
composed of teenagers who, like their elders, appeared to be enthralled with
the proceedings … The material, and even more, its presentation and
performance, contains all the elements of tragedy, comedy and dramatic interest
that anyone might require. An admirably
devised link between the items is provided by Bernard Shine who, as the
immortal warder, claims to have had charge of all important prisoners from
Socrates to the modern Fowle of John Mortimer’s Dock Brief. Commenting on the proceedings from both the
inside and the outside, he clarifies, explains, participates and involves the
emotions of the audience in every aspect of the theme. Remarkably good effects are achieved by the
integrating of such writings as extracts from Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading
Gaol” with some from Brendan Behan’s “The Quare Fellow” and Ronald Bayne’s
“Life of Cardinal Fisher with Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons.” Satires of such programmes as “This is Your
Life” and “The Brains Trust” are the least successful, light relief of a more
amusing kind being well provided for in the Mortimer extract and a delightful
piece from “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” ’
Everyone in the cast was praised,
especially Michael Kilgariff – ‘in the only solo item, a tour-de-force which
ends the programme, giving a resumé of ‘Great Expectations” from Pip’s first
meeting with the convict up to the sad death of Magwitch. In the
character of the adult Pip, Mr Kilgariff holds one’s attention throughout the
long discourse.’
Bernard Shine was older than the rest of
us, dark-haired, solid and an Australian.
Kilgariff was even taller than me – he was 6 feet 7 -- and a powerful
performer. Years later he was a very
good Master of Ceremonies at the Players’ Theatre under the arches of Charing Cross railway station, when I sang a duet,
dressed as a guardsman, with tiny Sheila Bernette. But
that’s another story.
The parts I played were … a
cricket-playing guardsman (about to be hanged) in The Ballad of Reading Gaol;
Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress; Cardinal Fisher; and Bernard Shaw in The
Brain’s Trust. I was also an Officer in
an extract from The Revenger’s Tragedy; the Duke of Clarence in Richard III;
and the lawyer, Morgenhall, in The Dock Brief. And once again I was associated with David
Caute, appearing as a Parson in an extract about “The Last Days of Will Starr”
from Comrade Jacob.
There was a lot to learn, and a lot to be
learned from playing so many different characters. I varied my physical and vocal performances
from character to character and was helped by minor make-up alterations, and
basic costume and headgear changes. We
also helped to set up the portable screens and in fetching and carrying the
costumes and lights to be used in each performance and then after each show clearing
the stage and the rooms we had occupied backstage. It was good theatre training in every way,
and served in my case instead of two years in a drama school.
We
travelled to each venue in a mini van, with the screens stacked and tied onto
the roof and a trailer packed with all the other gear towed behind it. Peter Rawley and Duncan accompanied us, but
not usually Ingrams, as did the wardrobe mistress, Mary Morgan, and the Stage
Manager, Brian Croft. Where the
distances involved were not too great, we met in Chelsea, drove to a venue and drove back
after the show. If journeying further
afield we lodged in assorted digs overnight before moving on the following
day. It was tiring and demanding, but I
don’t remember any upsets or rows.
The longest tour was in mid-November in Cumberland, where it was
cold and snowy. The Carlisle and County High
School for Girls refused to let their girls see
the play, believing that it was ‘in bad taste and not the type of thing the
girls should see.’ Although daytime
performances were generally well attended, the ones at night were not. And a
morning performance at the Technical College in Carlisle
had to be cancelled as no one at all turned up. At Wigton only two people turned up to see
the show and it was also cancelled. Duncan told a reporter,
‘If we have more people in the audience than we have in the company, the show
will go on.’ As there were 10 of us in
the company, there theoretically had to be an audience of at least 11. But I remember that we played before one audience
of less than that, although we didn’t perform when on one occasion the audience
consisted of two men and an attentive dog.
In Cumberland we performed in Keswick, at a school called St
Bees, then at Dalston in the morning and afternoon and at Brampton in the evening. An English mistress at a school in Dalston
told a reporter that it was exactly the kind of thing she had been looking for,
as she spent nearly 90 per cent of her time trying to persuade her pupils that
English literature was not ‘square’.
Bernard Shine told a reporter from the Cumberland Evening News that he
had carried out much the same work with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in Australia,
where it had been a great success. He
added, ‘We are safe-guarding our future in this way. With so many theatres closing down, all big
name actors should do tours like this, to introduce the kids to the
theatre. The children of today are
tomorrow’s audience.’
I returned to Edinburgh
for Christmas, and then it was back to London
before the end of December for more one-off performances of The Prisoners.
The
first of my pocket diaries which I kept is for 1962, and although there are
very brief and abbreviated references to events and people that are now
impossible to interpret, there is enough to put me right about the order of
events, of which I remember little if anything, even when reminded of
them.
The 1962 diary tells me that at the
beginning of the year I was still living in the flat at 25 Brompton Square. Michael Hedgecoe had clearly moved out by
this time as I had an address for him in Warwick Road, SW5.
On Monday, 1 January 1962 The Prisoners
was presented at the small and underground Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly, my
first appearance in a West End theatre. I remember nothing of this, nor of a Youth
Theatre party on 6 January. On the 7th
there was a meeting of the members of the actors’ union, Equity, in the
Ambassadors Theatre, and the next diary entry is on the 10th, when
all it says is ‘Rehearse.’ I imagine
this was necessitated because Kilgariff had left the company. His roles were taken over by a Youth Theatre
player, Colin Farrell. From the 15th
we embarked on an extensive and exhausting tour of London and adjacent
counties, usually giving two performances a day, at about 10.0 am or 2.15.
On the 15th we played at the Wandsworth Secondary School
for Boys and the Spencer
Park Secondary
School.
On the 16th it was the Westminster
City School
and the Samuel Pepys Secondary School. We were in Hackney on the 17th
and in Wimbledon on the 19th. It seems I was in Oxford on Sunday, 21 January at the start of
the Michaelmas Term for what the diary notes as ‘Auditions.’
I think this denotes the early stages of
yet another putative production of The Miracles, directed by Duncan and myself
and involving some students from Univ.
Whether it would have been presented by Tomorrow’s Audience isn’t clear
to me now, but I recall having a look at various churches in London as a potential venue for the production,
as well as doing some casting. Nick
Owen was to have been Jesus, and I took him through the part more than
once. But the difficulties of using
students from Univ, who would have to be rehearsed in Oxford,
and the problems surrounding the play’s performance in London, were insurmountable, and the whole
idea was eventually abandoned. Duncan wasn’t keen on
repeating a former success, and neither was I.
Besides, we both had to earn a living, and when Tomorrow’s Audience came
to an end, as it did, six weeks later, our careers temporarily diverged.
Meanwhile, The Prisoners was seen in Epsom
and Ewell on 22 January, in Camberley and Farnham, at the Convent of the Sacred
Heart in Epsom, and even at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, where the
audience was the most noisily appreciative we had had. I was in Oxford
on Sunday the 28th, and then it was back to performances of The
Prisoners in Haslemere, Merstham, Hampton,
Croydon, Caterham, Guildford and Bromley. On Sunday, 4 February we all headed down to
Canterbury in Kent, where Tomorrow’s Audience had
acquired a real theatre in which to perform for two weeks.
The Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury became available because of what
the Marlowe Playgoers’ Club called ‘a recess from regular repertory from
Christmas to Easter’ – no plays were being performed there. The theatre had closed. It had been named after Christopher Marlowe,
who was born in Canterbury in 1564, two months
before Shakespeare, and attended the local King’s School before making his name
as a playwright in London
and being murdered there when he was 29.
Such was our work-load that I had no opportunity to find out where the
young man who had written the two parts of Tamburlaine had lived and had been
to school – although I managed to see around Canterbury Cathedral and view the
very place where Becket had been murdered.
The Playgoers’ Club had launched an Appeal
Fund to support any professional productions that might apply to use the
theatre during the ‘recess’ and was able to provide Tomorrow’s Audience with
some financial assistance, as well as an invitation to perform at the
Marlowe. This opportunity had been
seized by Ingrams and Duncan as a chance to revitalise the Marlowe Theatre as an
entertainment centre for the community, by presenting not just plays. They hoped to entice the local populace into
the theatre, for instance, by happenings like a Record Show, ‘The Seven Deadly
Discs’, staged between 12.30 and 2.30 pm every day (admission free), during which
a ‘personality’ would be interviewed and/or give a talk.
The first of these personalities was a
comedy star of radio, television and films, Eric Barker, who lived in Kent. Others who were scheduled to appear – and I
don’t know whether they did – were Leslie Thomas, MP, Conservative member for
Canterbury; Dudley Moore, and Sean Kenny, who had designed the sets for
Oliver!. There was also a daily Jackpot
based on ticket numbers, the results being announced after the show, and a
Poetry Competition, which would be judged by Laurie Lee, whose novel, Cider
with Rosie had been published in 1959.
In addition a prize of £5 would be given for the best poem about ‘The
Prisoner’. And every evening at 6.0 pm
(admission free) a six-piece jazz band played on the stage for three-quarters
of an hour. Citizens were advised,
‘This show is deliberately informal.’
People were told they could arrive or leave when they liked.
In our first week at the Marlowe The
Prisoners was presented every week-night at 7.15 pm, with matinees on Thursday
and Saturday, when we performed at 5.0 and 7.40 pm. Audiences were thin. The Kent Gazette reviewer noted that there
were less than 30 people in the stalls – ‘one of the smallest audiences I can
remember seeing at the theatre.’
Nonetheless he enjoyed the show and praised the cast – ‘the standard of
acting throughout is of the highest level.’
He particularly liked ‘a hilarious episode from John Mortimer’s Dock
Brief ’ – in which I appeared with Timothy Harley. The
Kent Messenger thought that the show was ‘vivid and exciting’ and ‘witty and
amusing’, that Colin Farrell gave ‘a brilliant display of his talents’, also
that Gordon Honeycombe deserved ‘special mention for his fine
characterisations.’
In the second week the Canterbury audiences were treated to ‘Two
World Premieres’ – A Day at Izzard’s Wharf by Peter Everett, and The
Bed-Sitting Room by John Antrobus and Spike Milligan. These had to be rehearsed in the first week,
every morning and afternoon, from 10.30 to 12 and from 2.0 until 4.0. There was a run-through on the afternoon of
the 9th. It was a very busy
week.
There were some cast changes. Willie Rushton, Brian Miller and Liz Gannon
had joined the company and Robin Spry, a Canadian who’d been at Univ, had taken
over from Peter Rawley as General Manager in January. He also took some photos of us in Canterbury, including one
of me, in a cricket cap as the guardsman in The Prisoners, and Brian Miller,
likewise in costume, looking thoughtful as we shared cups of tea and biscuits
with Arnold Wesker and a female friend.
Willie Rushton played the lead, Dr Bules
Martin, in The Bed-Sitting Room, which was played by me. In the first scene I appeared as an
impoverished Lord Fortnum, wearing a top hat and newspapers as boots and with a
funny walk. I visited Dr Martin,
concerned about my health, on the third anniversary of ‘the Nuclear
Misunderstanding’ which had left 40 million dead and was over in two minutes 28
seconds. The world was now ‘full of fog
and chickens.’ In the second scene I
had turned into the bed-sitting room, which was able to talk to its
occupants. To do this I stood at a
microphone in the wings. Willie Rushton
was tremendous fun, on stage and off.
He thought we would be an ideal Jeeves and Wooster, on television or on the stage. A great idea, which was never, alas,
realised.
The play had some very wacky characters,
apart from Lord Fortnum. There was a
plastic mac man with a candle on his head, played by Ingrams himself, a vicar
in a frogman’s suit with flippers, a prime minister who turned into a parrot,
and a wife who turned into a chest of drawers.
The Kent Messenger said, ‘This off-beat
pair of plays makes a wonderfully entertaining evening.’ The Kent Gazette said both plays ‘were given
a cordial reception. The Bed-Sitting
Room was, it said, ‘a hilarious satire on the modern world.’ William
Rushton gave ‘a brilliant performance,’ and I was said to draw ‘a delicious
caricature as his lordship.’ The
Gazette informed its readers at the end of its review that ‘the Marlowe
Playgoers’ Club were hosts for a most enjoyable wine and cheese party at the
theatre.’
The Daily Telegraph summed up The
Bed-Sitting Room as ‘all experiment, a chunk of Goonery amusingly and quite
cleverly transferred to the stage.’ Ken
Tynan in The Observer said, ‘The British survivors are a jumpy few, who twitch
balletically whenever the bomb is mentioned.
The protagonist, a plump horn-rimmed doctor hilariously played by
William Rushton, runs a ‘surplus, army and psychiatry store’ where people
fervently traipse in search of second-hand boots, instant psycho-analysis and
prescriptions for food. They are
bothered by genetic mutations … A peer of the realm undergoes an inadvertent
metamorphosis into a Paddington bed-sitter (“No coloureds,” he sternly
insists). Stethoscope to the wall, the
doctor examines him for dry rot … Elsewhere, we find a vicar who offers
king-size weddings with flip-top Bibles; and there is a also a definitively
bizarre comment on marital sex. A telephone
rings, sounding like Bow Bells. The
doctor lifts the receiver and listens.
After a moment or two he briskly unzips his trousers and peels them down
to his ankles. Straightening up he murmurs
into the mouth-piece: “Hallo, darling …” ’
Tynan suggested that ‘it would be well
worth a trial at the Royal Court.’
And
indeed that was where Tomorrow’s Audience appeared in a week’s time – but not
with The Bed-Sitting Room, which, however, reappeared two years later as a
full-length play at the Mermaid Theatre before transferring to the Duke of
York’s Theatre. In this production
Graham Stark was the Doctor, Spike Milligan was Mate, and Valentine Dyall was
Lord Fortnum. The play was revived in
1967 and then made into an unsuccessful film, with Ralph Richardson as Lord
Fortnum.
It seems we remained in Canterbury
for another week, as the diary says we were at Dover
Grammar School on the 19th
and at Ashford Girls School
on the 22nd. Some dates were
cancelled. The diary notes that I
returned to London from Canterbury
on Friday, 23 February, and I seem to have gone down to Bournemouth
on the Saturday to have lunch with AD.
Then on Sunday, 25 February 1962, after a rehearsal in the afternoon at
the Royal Court Theatre,
The Prisoners made its last appearance in a theatre.
The Royal Court
Theatre in Sloane Square had,
under George Devine’s management, launched itself with three productions in
1956, the third play to be staged, in May, being John Osborne’s Look Back in
Anger. Three weeks later Brendan
Behan’s The Quare Fellow was staged at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in
Stratford East. Waiting for Godot had
been directed by Peter Hall at the Arts Theatre the previous year. 1956 saw the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union
and the Suez Crisis. It was also a time
of revolutionary change in the theatre, involving portrayals on stage and in
film of working-class dramas played by actors with working-class origins. Osborne’s The Entertainer, with Laurence
Olivier and Alan Bates, appeared in 1957 at the Royal Court, to be followed by Luther in
the autumn of 1961. I had seen none of
these plays and when occupying a dressing-room at the Royal Court in February 1962 and appearing
on the stage I was unaware of the notable actors and directors who had preceded
me there.
Our one-off appearance in the Royal Court was
followed by twice daily performances at schools in Leytonstone, Ilford and
Harlow and lastly by an afternoon performance in Caterham on 2 March. Then
Tomorrow’s Audience threw in the towel and ceased to operate due, I expect, to
its financial losses.
Like everyone else, I was now out of
work.
I was in Oxford
on 3 March and was back in London
on 8 March. It was in this period,
until the end of April, that I hitch-hiked where I could, hitching a lift to
Oxford on the A40 by the White City and on the Oxford bypass back to
London. I wore a college scarf to
indicate that I was a harmless and impoverished student. Hitch-hiking was a tedious and demoralising
business. It was strange sitting beside
a total stranger, someone I had never met before and would never see again.
Duncan and I had both moved out of the Brompton Square flat
and I moved into a bed-sit in Ovington
Square, off the southern side of the Brompton Road. At the same time I signed on at a Labour
Exchange, having to appear there twice weekly, on Wednesday and Friday
mornings. And now that I had been
launched on a career as a professional actor, I determined to follow this up by
writing to casting directors and agents in pursuit of an acting job. It also seems that The Miracles project was
still being pursued, as I auditioned some students, like John Bush, in Oxford and called on Peter
Bayley. I also visited the Gibb Youth
Club in Vicarage Gate at 8.15 pm on 8 March, looking for potential cast
members, and I was at the LSE on the 13th. But by April the project had been
abandoned.
It was about this time that Sid was
smitten, not badly, with TB. He was
incarcerated in a hospital just outside Oxford
for a few weeks, perhaps a month, and like me was able to continue his
studies. I visited him feeling
somewhat guilty, as he’d obviously caught the disease from me, and wasn’t
pleased when I had to share my visit with pert little Janet Lister. I was unaware that they were still in touch,
and unaware later on that Sid took up for a time with a tall nurse at the hospital
and then with another tall girl, a Danish girl temporarily studying at St
Clare’s.
Meanwhile, in London, I saw various
actors’ agents, like Pauline Melville at the Royal Court, Maurice Hatton,
Christopher Mann, and Kenneth Ewing of Fraser and Dunlop, and I wrote to BBC TV
and Granada TV and even to the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington, which must
have been staging some Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Anyone whom I’d met and who had theatrical
contacts I talked to and sought their advice, and I scanned the pages of The
Stage for items about casting sessions and forthcoming productions. I auditioned at the Mermaid Theatre for some
play, and also for Laurier Lister, who was sorting through the supporting cast
for the new Chichester Festival Theatre.
Meanwhile, I was still having hospital check-ups in connection with my
health – I was at the Brompton
Hospital on 26 March,
presumably for an X-ray.
I was buzzing about, not focused on anything
in particular, except getting a job, nor going anywhere apart from to Oxford, Bournemouth and Edinburgh, where I was on 16 April. But more than likely I was in Cornwall during the Oxford
vacation, on my own or with Sid, who helped me note down all the names of
Honeycombes we found in parish registers.
The Easter period is a blank in the diary,
nothing being noted until 29 April when I wrote ‘Oxford Term begins.’ This is followed on Monday, 30 April by ‘To
London’ and ‘Spry’.
On this day and the next I acted in a
short amateur film being made by Robin Spry, who’d been Tomorrow Audience’s
General Manager since January that year, until the company disbanded. Apart from photography Robin was also into
film-making and films.
He was three years younger than me, and
consequently I’d had little to do with him at Univ. His father was the Canadian Consul in London and Robin lived in the consulate, which had a flag
over the front door, in one of those five-storey wedding-cake town houses in Belgravia, at 28
Chester Street, SW1. Robin was tall, fair and unflappable. He was at the LSE in London
until 1964 and at the end of the year went to work for the National Film Board
of Canada,
where he went on to make several award-winning films, TV series and
documentaries. Wikipedia tells me that he
died in a car accident in Montreal
in 2005.
This short film of his, in which I appeared
along with a couple of other people, centred on a triangular domestic situation
and was filmed in and around friends’ houses.
I took part in a similar, more elaborate film of his in 1963. I was the husband, suspicious of my
wife. There wasn’t much dialogue – the
stories were told through the characters’ actions and reactions. Robin again did everything, all the writing,
filming and directing. The lover was an
established professional actor, Tom Adams.
I was in awe of him, as although he was younger than me and darkly
handsome, he had already appeared (albeit in small parts) in Emergency – Ward
10, The Avengers, and even in a major movie, The Great Escape.
I don’t recall seeing Robin’s finished
films. But the mere fact of being in a
film was a pleasure, a feeling I never lost.
The standing around, the waiting, the retakes, were never a bore. I found the whole process of creating a
fantasy with pictures was endlessly fascinating, especially when on
location.
Later on, in 1967, I became involved with
a group of young Hampstead film-makers, who included Robert Carter, Andrew
Holmes and Misha Norland. Again, the
films they made were filmed on location.
I enjoyed the whole process, as well as the creative companionship of
the group. When we got together
socially we drank cheap wine and smoked pot.
Someone would roll a joint and pass it around. It never did anything for me, as when
smoking cigarettes I never inhaled.
Misha’s 17-minute film was quite
elaborate. Shot over several weeks in
the spring, it was called The Commuter.
It was about a businessman (me) who fell in love with a female dummy he
saw in a shop window. He purchases the
dummy and enjoys a romantic session with her in the pergola of Anna Pavlova’s
garden, a formal garden near Hampstead Heath, where she turns into a real
girl. There was no dialogue. The film ended with me waltzing with the
dummy through the concourse of Waterloo Station, after which we got on a
commuters’ train. For the film I wore
my toupee and a suit, and once seated in a train carriage opposite my
lady-friend, I removed the toupee, settled back with a newspaper, and the
camera pulled back to reveal that I was on my own. The dummy was a fantasy, as had been the
girl.
The film was shown towards the end of the
year at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead for a week as part of the cinema’s daily
programme, and also at the Paris-Pullman Cinema Club in South
Kensington in March 1968.
In October 1967 I actually received a cheque for £11 from Misha for
acting in The Commuter – my first payment for acting in a film.
While on the subject of films, which I’d
loved since I was a child in India, let me add, for the record, that I later
played a TV newsreader in The Medusa Touch (1978), starring Richard Burton and
Lee Remick (Michael Hordern was also in it), in which a news item eerily
foreshadowed, and showed, the flying of a passenger jet into an office tower,
in this case in London. In the film
this was sombrely watched by Burton
and Remick in a darkened living-room.
I never met them as my brief news-reading segment (I rewrote the script
to conform with ITN’s style of writing) was filmed in a TV studio – as was my
brief appearance in The Fourth Protocol (1987), which starred Michael Caine and
Pierce Brosnan. In this film I had to
interview Alan Rickman, who was rather intense and scary. Earlier, I was a news-reading voice in a
Sean Connery film, Ransom (1975), and was also heard as such in Castaway
(1986), which starred Oliver Reed. My
last English film was Bullseye (1990), possibly the worst film Michael Winner
ever made. However, as a TV reporter
this time, I was given my very own trailer on location at Mortlake in South London, in which to rest and wait, and had the
pleasure of meeting both Michael Caine and Roger Moore in the make-up
trailer. They were both there when I
stepped inside. ‘Allo, Gordon,’ said
Michael Caine. ‘Hello,’ said
Roger. ‘Welcome aboard.’
I was in four films made in Perth, in Western
Australia. But
veils are best drawn over three of them -- although in one, as the sinister
leader of an orgiastic cult, I was, I think, quite good.
Now back to May 1962.
I was in Oxford for the day on Wednesday, 2 May. Back in London on 3 May I moved into a
room in a flat owned by a married couple in 18 Draycott Place, off Sloane Square. I was in effect their lodger. It was about then, or at the end of April,
that I auditioned for Laurence Olivier.
This resulted from the audition I had done
for Laurier Lister a few weeks ago, in connection with the company that was
being assembled for Olivier’s inaugural season as Artistic Director of the new
Chichester Festival Theatre. Olivier
had chosen to direct three plays, The Chances, The Broken Heart by John Ford,
and Uncle Vanya, and would appear in the last two. The season was to open on 5 July 1962, and
the company included his wife, Joan Plowright, Fay Compton, Joan Greenwood,
John Neville and Keith Michell.
I didn’t know at the time that Laurier
Lister had produced a series of revues in the 40s and early 50s and was the
lifelong partner of Max Adrian, who had starred in them and was currently
playing Jaques in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production at the Aldwych
Theatre, which I saw, and in which Vanessa Redgrave had enchanted all the
critics with her rapturous portrayal of Rosalind. Lister wrote to me and asked me to do what
was known as a call-back, a second audition.
I don’t remember where this audition was held, but it was in one of the West End theatres.
When
attending such an audition the hopeful actor reported to the Stage Door, waited
there until summoned to the prompt-side wings of the theatre, and then stood in
the shadowy darkness while the person before him acted out two self-chosen
audition speeches on the stage. Silence
and indistinct voices from the stalls followed the audition. There was a pause. Then the person who’d just aired his talents
left the stage, nodded as he passed me and said, ‘Good luck.’ The Stage Manager, in response to a voice
from the stalls, then waved me onto the stage. ‘Mr Gordon Honeycombe!’ he announced.
Standing at the forefront of the stage,
bathed in light, I was aware of a knot of people in the middle of the stalls,
and wondered if Olivier was actually there.
One of these persons asked me what I was going to give them. I told them ‘John of Gaunt’ and ‘Bassanes
from The Broken Heart.’ I chose the latter
as it was unfamiliar and showed that I had read the play. I gave them one of Bassanes’ speeches first,
not knowing that the obsessively jealous Bassanes would be played at Chichester by Olivier himself. After a pause I was then encouraged to deliver
my John of Gaunt. ‘Thank you -- carry
on,’ someone called out, and I launched into ‘Methinks I am a prophet new
inspired’ as if I was once again on the stage of the theatre in Lyons, with such volume
and energy that I ended up out of breath and gasping. This time there was no applause and no one
said, ‘Well done.’
Then a figure detached itself from the
others in the stalls and came down the aisle to the front of the stage. It was Olivier.
Although I’d never seen him on stage, I’d
seen him in films and photos of him – Spartacus was released in 1959. He was 55 and had just finished filming Term
of Trial in Dublin,
with Sarah Miles and Terence Stamp. The
previous year he had divorced Vivien Leigh and married Joan Plowright, who had
produced their first child in December.
Olivier beckoned to me to approach him. I crouched on the stage above him. He thanked me for letting him hear Bassanes’
speech and gave me some technical notes about the delivery of Shakespeare’s
lines. I was so out of breath I was
speechless, in more ways than one. He
thanked me again and walked away into the darkness of the stalls.
The fact that he had taken the trouble to
leave his seat in the stalls and talk to me seemed propitious. But a letter from Laurier Lister soon
informed me that I would not be joining the Chichester
company. I suspect this was partly due
to my height. Keith Michell was the
tallest of the men in the company and he was shorter than me. I would have towered over everyone on stage,
even as a solider or servant. I just
didn’t fit in.
Nothing daunted I then saw in The Stage
that Clifford Williams was going to direct a new play at the Arts Theatre. It was by David Rudkin, who had been at Oxford the same time as me. It was called Afore Night Come. And the main character was an Oxford student,
fruit-picking in an orchard as a vacation job.
I wrote to Williams, enclosing a resumé of my meagre experience as a
pro, and he asked me to come and see him at the Aldwych Theatre, not at the
Arts. This must have been in the first
week of May. It was certainly after I
moved into my new accommodation in Draycott
Place on Thursday, 3 May.
When I turned up at the Stage Door of the
Aldwych Theatre I was directed, to my surprise, not to the stage, but to an
office at the front of the building, where Clifford Williams was ensconced
behind a large desk. He indicated that
I was to sit in a chair on the other side of the desk. It seemed he just wanted to have a look at
me and have a chat. He didn’t mention Afore
Night Come – the part of the Oxford
student went in fact to Peter McEnery, who was four years younger than me. Referring to my resumé Clifford Williams
remarked that I hadn’t had much experience, although what I’d had was
useful. Then he puzzled me by asking me
to go and stand in a corner of the room.
I did so and he nodded and smiled and told me to sit down again. Then, still smiling, he picked up the
receiver of a telephone on the desk and dialled a number. ‘Maurice,’ he said. ‘I’ve got just the man we’re looking for.’
They conferred briefly and then he said to
me that Maurice would see me the following day for an audition. Would such and such a time be all right? He explained that Maurice was Maurice
Daniels, the Repertory Manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company at
Stratford-on-Avon. It seemed an extra
actor was needed to join the company.
This was extraordinary, as I knew that three of Shakespeare’s plays were
already being staged at Stratford,
Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew. Was I needed to play a special part in the
fourth production?
So the following day I again turned up at
the Stage Door of the Aldwych Theatre and this time I was directed downstairs
and straight onto the stage, onto the set of As You Like It, which was centred
on a large oak-tree that dominated the rear of the stage. Here I had seen, a month or so ago from the
Upper Circle, Vanessa Redgrave as a definitive, entrancing Rosalind, with Ian
Bannen as Orlando, acting out the comedic complications of the play. Now I was on the stage where they had
danced.
Nobody else was auditioning, and there was
only one man in the stalls, and he was standing, not sitting. He introduced himself – I had never heard of
Maurice Daniels – and asked me to carry on.
Without even removing the coat I was wearing I launched into Brutus’s
speech from Julius Caesar, ‘It must be by his death …’ As Brutus was soliloquising in his orchard at
night, the coat and even the tree seemed appropriate.
‘Thank you,’ said Maurice Daniels. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’ He disappeared and then reappeared from the
wings. He wanted to know whether I
would be able to join the company at Stratford. Could I be there on Monday? And would £11 a week be acceptable? I said, totally bewildered and not
believing what was happening, ‘Yes … yes.’
I was instructed to find out from the RSC
management what digs might be available in Stratford
and I had to tell the couple in Draycott
Place that I was moving out, as I was going to be
acting with the RSC in Stratford. The Labour Exchange had also to be told that
I would no longer be seeking the dole.
I telephoned some friends and wrote to my mother and AD and celebrated
by going to see Lionel Bart’s musical Blitz! at the Adelphi Theatre and Arnold
Wesker’s Chips with Everything and the film of The Waltz of the Toreadors. And on my way to Stratford
on Sunday, 13 May, I stopped off at Oxford
to tell Sid of my good luck. Typically, he was more amazed than congratulatory.
I was also amazed, and
apprehensive.
How was I going to fit in? What parts might I play? Maurice
Daniels had said that I would go into Measure for Measure and Macbeth, which
was already in rehearsal. On my way to Stratford I allowed
myself to become excited.
I didn’t know it then, but my height
proved this time to be an asset. I had
been employed to fill a large gap in the stage.
12. STRATFORD AND
LONDON, 1962-63
I arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon
on the night of Sunday, 13 May 1962 and checked into the accommodation that the
theatre had suggested I might try. The
management had a list of digs, places where landladies took in theatrical
persons as lodgers.
It was a bed and breakfast place in
Chestnut Walk, on the edge of a small park and not that far from the
theatre. The landlady was like a fleshy
elderly Ophelia, with long flowing fair hair, round eyes, dabs of rouge on her
cheeks and a hint of eye-liner. She
directed me to a room on the first floor facing the front, which was filled
with antiquated furniture, including a high double bed. Breakfast was taken in a dark ground-floor
room at the rear, beside a small kitchen, where I and the other lodger
(generally a different one each week) shared the breakfast table with Ophelia’s
antiquated mother, a hunched silent eater of the greasy fried bacon and eggs
that were served up every morning, along with a large pot of tea and a rack of
thick toast. Ophelia seldom sat with
us. She served us and stood, waiting
until a plate could be taken away or something provided. Very little was said. Boarding there cost me £3 a week.
After breakfast on the morning of Monday,
14 May, I found my way to the theatre, along Chapel Lane and Church Street, past the school that
Shakespeare attended as a boy and the house he lived in towards the end of his
life and where he had once walked many times himself. At the time I didn’t give any thought to any
of that – I was too much in the here and now of every new day.
At the bulky red-brick theatre I reported
to the management. I was given
instructions about rehearsals, insurance and the like, and was taken by Maurice
Daniels to where the rehearsals for Macbeth were taking place, in a high,
curved, hollow, church-like space at the rear of the theatre. It had once been the auditorium of the
original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was destroyed by fire in 1926 and
rebuilt by 1932. Here a mock-up of the
set for Macbeth had been laid out and here the cast were blocking the final
battle, ie, sorting out and setting everyone’s exits, entrances and moves. This was interrupted while I was introduced.
How they must have stared at this new
addition to the company, smartly but unsuitably dressed in a college blazer,
cravat, and grey trousers -- which I’d worn for my meeting with the
management. I was directed to join the
soldiery, some whom said, ‘Hello,’ and introduced themselves, and before long I
was copying what the other spear-carriers were doing and exulting with them at
the death of Macbeth. It was all rather strange, unlikely and unreal. We
were Macbeth’s servants and soldiers for most of the play, but now, in the
middle of Act V, we were Malcolm’s men, and had advanced towards Dunsinane
bearing leafy boughs, after which we made warlike noises offstage as Macbeth
fought and killed Young Siward, and then fought with Macduff until they exited,
still fighting. Macbeth was killed
offstage. The victorious Malcolm and
the Scottish lords now entered and Old Siward mourned the death of his
son. Macduff reappeared, attended by
soldiers, knelt before Malcolm, hailing him as king and said, ‘Behold where
stands the usurper’s cursed head!’
Macduff was Bill Travers, whose career had
touched on mine twice before, at school and in Hong Kong. Now his words resulted in my first bit of
business with the RSC. For Eric Porter,
who was playing Macbeth, suggested to the director, Donald McWhinnie, that
Macduff shouldn’t return bearing the head, as the stage direction said, but
while kneeling before Malcolm should gesture upstage, whereupon one of the
soldiers should hold the head up by its hair.
And that soldier, he suggested, should be me.
This was visually more effective, and
sensible, as I was the tallest of the soldiers. So I held up an imaginary head and tried to
look fierce while everyone cheered. For
two seconds I was suddenly the focal point in the play.
I learned that morning that I had also been
hired as the eighth kingly apparition in the ghostly procession of eight kings
in Act IV Scene 1. The company had
belatedly discovered that they didn’t have enough extras (or spear-carriers as
they were called) to portray all eight kings on stage at the same time. The last king was the most important as he
had a mirror that showed Macbeth more of Banquo’s successors, and it would be a
visual help, I presume, if the last king was the tallest. I was also put into Measure for Measure as
one of the soldiers in the long final scene had developed a tendency to
faint. I took his place.
At later rehearsals of Macbeth I was added
to earlier scenes as a servant or soldier -- my biggest scene, apart from the
final battle, being the banquet that featured the ghost of Banquo, when, with
other servants, I carried on fake food and drink for Macbeth’s guests. I was also one of three soldiers with
spears, standing motionless with our backs to the stage on the imagined
castle’s ramparts, while Macbeth, on hearing of his wife’s death, knelt
downstage centre, and leaning on his sword, spoke those famous lines –
‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to
day … And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death … It is
a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
Eric Porter spat out the last lines,
yelling ‘idiot!’ and putting a great deal of passion into ‘sound and fury.’ The last two words, ‘signifying nothing,’
were snarled, almost hissed. He had
dark eyes and a ravaged face and I thought he was excellent as Macbeth.
The interval was after Act III Scene 4,
when Lady Macbeth (Irene Worth), in response to Macbeth’s ‘Come, we’ll to
sleep,’ seemed sorrowfully to reject him and drifted away. Then came my other big scene. In Act IV Scene 1, when Macbeth consulted
the three Witches about the future, they summoned up three apparitions out of
their cauldron and then the eight kings.
The stage direction says, ‘Eight kings appear, and pass over in order,
the last with a glass in his hand, Banquo following.’ We
emerged from under the stage, downstage left, in golden robes and wearing
crowns, and stalked slowly across the stage to exit upstage right. The procession was led by the shortest
apparition and ended with me, the tallest, holding a hand-mirror, which I
angled towards Macbeth, whereupon he cried out, ‘And yet the eighth appears,
who bears a glass which shows me many more!’
But the first night of Macbeth was still
three weeks away. Already in
performance were A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew and Measure
for Measure, which had been directed by John Blatchley. I wasn’t added to the first two productions,
and so had evenings off and matinees whenever they were performed. But I was almost immediately inserted into
the line-up of ducal soldiers in Act V of Measure for Measure, who stood in the
last scene for almost half an hour in a wide semi-circle at the back of the
stage, wearing coarse-clothed uniforms, with hairy hats and boots. I’m not sure whether one of the soldiers,
Ian Lindsay, actually fainted as he was carrying, like all the other soldiers,
a 12-feet high banner. But any wavering, while he stood at attention,
would have been very noticeable. So I
replaced him, and was put in the middle of the group, with three other soldiers
on either side of me. Our sole job,
apart from being decorative, was to lower our banners slowly at the end of the
play, after the other actors had left the stage, while music played and the
stage darkened, until the ends of the banners, flags unfurled, met majestically
in the centre of the stage.
Although there was a performance of Measure
for Measure on Tuesday, 15 May, I don’t think I was in it. I imagine a soldier’s costume would have
taken a few days to be made for me and fitted – Ian Lindsay’s would have been
far too small. As I was free every
evening, I asked for, and was given, a ticket for one of the house seats at the
back of the stalls. Now fully aware of
my truly amazing and extraordinary good fortune to be there and to be one of
the company, with enormous pleasure I watched Judi Dench, Marius Goring, Tom
Fleming, Ian Holm, Clive Swift and Ian Richardson perform in Measure for
Measure, and Judi, Diana Rigg, Ian Holm and Ian Richardson in The Dream, and
Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Godfrey in The Shrew.
I had of course met Vanessa during the production
of The Miracles in Edinburgh the year before and, laughing in her breathless
throaty way, she said (when I reminded her later on) that she remembered
meeting the cast and judging the beards.
And now, unbelievable as it seemed to me, we were not only in the same
company, but would soon be performing in the same play, Cymbeline.
The next performance of Measure for
Measure was on Monday, 21 May, and it must have been then that I first appeared
on the Stratford
stage. There was an evening performance
and a matinee the following Thursday, and a week later there were again two
shows and one on the Friday. The first
night of Macbeth was on Tuesday, 5 June.
By then I had met most of the company,
which numbered 33 leading actors and 21 who played minor roles or carried
spears. About the same number of people
worked behind the scenes and in the running of the theatre, which had been
headed by Peter Hall since January 1960.
It was after this that he was joined by Peter Brook and Michel
Saint-Denis. The Aldwych Theatre in London
then became the base for a second company, and the two companies, at Stratford and London,
were now called the Royal Shakespeare Company, the RSC. The Arts Theatre became the showcase for the
RSC’s smaller productions, opening its doors in March 1961 with Everything in
the Garden by Giles Cooper, which was followed by Nil Carborandum, The Lower
Depths and Afore Night Come. That year
the RSC staged at the Aldwych Theatre a hugely successful series of plays,
including The Collection, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, As You Like It, The
Cherry Orchard and Becket.
Some of the company’s leading actors, who
played at the Arts, the Aldwych and Stratford,
commuted between London and Stratford.
For the two main theatres were
run as repertories, presenting a mixed series of plays every week. When Eric Porter finished playing Becket in London, he came to Stratford
to rehearse Macbeth and later on Cymbeline.
Vanessa Redgrave alternated playing Rosalind in London with Katharina in The Shrew. At the time I believe that the leading actors
at Stratford
were being paid about £60 a week, as against my £11.
The Stratford
theatre had its own workshops and wardrobe, as well as its own music director,
musicians, voice coach, choreographer and fight arranger (John Barton). Peter Brook, Peter Wood and Donald McWhinnie
were Associate Directors when I joined the company, and John Bury designed the
sets and the lighting – as he’d done for the OUDS’ Richard II -- for both
Measure for Measure and Macbeth. The
back-stage people we spear-carriers saw the most were the two Stage Managers
and the three ASMs, two of whom were always in the wings, calling actors’ names
over the intercom when their scenes were due, and keeping an eye on the props,
the lighting and the prompt book.
When summoned to appear on stage, we were
all called Mr or Miss. The names of the
seven of us who occupied dressing-room 12a on the first floor of the Stage Door
side of the theatre – 13 was deemed to be unlucky – were all also prefaced with
a Mr. In a few weeks my name appeared,
without the Mr, in the programme for Macbeth and then in the revised programme
for Measure for Measure. It was gratifying
to see it there, even at the bottom of the cast-list among the other soldiers
and servants. And it was properly
spelt.
The seven of us in 12a were a motley
crew. John Corvin, who had been in the
Merchant Navy, was about 12 years older than me and I was 25. He had a deep voice and used it to good
effect when he was cast as Jupiter in Cymbeline. Ian Hewitson had already been given a
leading role, as Flute in The Dream. He
was an odd fellow, with big dark staring eyes and a solitary nature. He ate rolls in the dressing-room and used
to butter them with a half-crown coin.
Bryan Reed, with his bluff, jovial manner, his portly frame, pale face,
reddish thinning hair and beard, could have played Falstaff. He had a fondness for beer and also a
problem with asthma. Periodically he would
produce a throat-spray when he began wheezing or was short of breath, and
squirt the spray into his mouth. Peter
Geddis and Ian Lindsay were both married and so didn’t socialise much with the
rest of us. But Lindsay and his little
wife had a baby, which was a thing of joy to Paul Greenhalgh. He was a slim young fellow and gay in every
way – cheerful, blithe and affectionate.
By the end of the season he’d discreetly had sex, I think, with several
of the male members of the company.
Love was not involved. But it
was, allegedly, with some who doted on Brian Murray, the junior lead in the
company. He was a well-built, big-eyed,
fair-haired South African with large loose lips and looked good in tights. He played Leander in The Dream, Malcolm in
Macbeth, and Guiderius in Cymbeline. He
and Diana Rigg – Helena in The Dream and Lady Macduff in Macbeth – were alleged
to be more than friends. I remember
being in someone’s flat where an LP of the songs of West Side Story was being
played, and Diana was sitting on the floor, twisting a strand of her hair
around a finger and leaning against Brian, and I looked at them, wondering, as
‘Somewhere’ was sung – ‘There’s a place for us, somewhere a place for us.’
Diana shared a rented house with a senior
actor, Paul Hardwick, who also allegedly adored Brian Murray. Paul was black-haired, brown-faced and had
currant-bun eyes. He had a big, growly voice and was wonderfully
countrified and comical as Bottom in The Dream.
I remember a story he told with
(to me) surprising frankness about meeting Tab Hunter at a party in America. Paul was effusively extolling the young
man’s physique and looks. ‘Come, come,’
scolded Tab Hunter. ‘I almost have,’
beamed Paul.
I was not without admirers myself. But more about that later.
Diana and Brian were a year or so younger
than me. Those of us who were roughly
the same age tended to associate with each other, in the Green Room, at
rehearsals and in the Dirty Duck (the local pub, the Black Swan). This included the four girls who filled the
roles of any female attendants and ladies in the plays and understudied the
female leads. Two of these girls were
married -- one of them, Iris MacGregor, to the other junior lead, Barry
MacGregor. He and Brian were brothers
in two of the plays and competing lovers in The Dream – Barry was
Demetrius. The other wife was small and
serious Margaret Drabble, married to Clive Swift and soon to become a
best-selling author, who played various villainous supporting roles, like
Cloten in Cymbeline. They had a
one-year-old baby called Mark.
Peter Hall was a great believer in the
family aspects of the company, and every Friday, which was payday, all the
wives and children used to congregate in the Green Room, along with the young
boys and girls who were also in the company, playing fairies and minor roles,
like Fleance, and Macduff’s son. Paul
Greenhalgh liked being with the families, as did Judi Dench, who, according to
Ian Richardson, was ‘just wonderful with all those children.’
Maggie Drabble’s first novel, A Summer
Birdcage, would be published the following year. When not rehearsing or on stage, she could
be heard tapping away at a typewriter in her dressing-room. She understudied Vanessa Redgrave as Imogen
in Cymbeline, and as I was appointed to understudy Posthumus Leonatus, Imogen’s
husband, we shared some romantic moments at understudy rehearsals, never
knowing that one day we would both write best-selling books. Although I found out that she had been to Cambridge, where she got
a first in English, and was writing a novel, we didn’t connect. She was three years younger than me and
rather solemn. Fortunately we never had
to go on as Imogen or Posthumus as we were both miscast, and I for one didn’t
know my words. It would have been interesting,
and terrifying, if we had.
The other two girls, with whom Paul
Greenhalgh was friendly, were Patricia Brake and Nerys Hughes, who would become
well-known through their appearances in several TV sitcoms and dramas. They were the youngest members of the
company, both being 19 at the time. The
older and senior actors didn’t have much to do with us, and some, like Marius
Goring and Tom Fleming (respectively Angelo and the Duke in Measure for
Measure) we only saw on stage. Several
of the older actors, of whom I had never heard, like Edmond Bennett, Newton
Blick, Donald Layne-Smith and Norah Blaney, had seemingly been rescued from
oblivion and given a job. Cast-lists of
old productions are full of the names of forgotten actors, some of whom once
played leading roles but barely managed to exist for many years playing minor
parts. Norah Blaney had in fact been a
music-hall star and film star between the wars. She was also an excellent pianist, and I
once listened in wonder as I heard someone giving a virtuoso performance of a
classical piece in our rehearsal space.
I peered into the room, and it was Norah Blaney.
The Green Room, which served as a
cafeteria, overlooked the river and was the meeting-place of the younger company
members, like the spear-carriers, the girls, the minor parts and some of those
playing leading roles, like Ian Richardson, Ian Holm, Tony Church, who were all
married, and Diana, Brian and Peter Jeffrey, whose wife, Yvonne Bonnamy, was
also in the company. I ate most of my
meals in the Green Room and played cards with some of the cast.
It now seems remarkable to me that several
actors in the company, like me, had never been to a drama school. A few, like Peter Hall himself, had acted at
Cambridge – as
had Peter Jeffrey, Tony Church, John Barton and Maggie Drabble -- and there was
a decided preference in the whole company for university-educated people. But of the spear-carriers, or extras, I was
the only one who had been at a university.
When I wrote to AD and told her that I was
joining the RSC, she was astonished.
She wrote in her Memories, ‘I found it difficult to believe that such a
prestigious company would accept anyone lacking professional experience or
suitable training, but I was pleased to be proved wrong.’ I wasn’t astonished that I was at Stratford, I was totally amazed.
In 12a we all had our own individual
places, chairs and side-lit mirrors, where we made ourselves up and put up Good
Luck cards, telegrams and personal souvenirs.
There was also a place for our costumes to be hung up and stacked. In the matter of make-up, I learned from my
neighbours that less was enough, that the whole face didn’t have to be
plastered with a mix of 5 and 9 sticks of grease-paint, nor red dots put in the
inner corner of the eyes. It was enough
to emphasise the eyes with an eye-liner and some shading on the eye-lids, and
to apply a dusting of powder to reduce any sweaty shining of the skin. Cheeks might be hollowed with a thin smudge
of brown, as could one’s nose, further high-lighted by a smoothed touch of
white. Later on I experimented with the
subtle effects of different colours, outlining my mouth and creating wrinkles
and lines, and before long I asked for and was fitted with a short-haired
wig. My hair had started thinning at
the front and I was conscious that it was not a good look for a soldier or a
servant. Besides, it helped me put on a
character and lose my self, as did make-up and the different costumes.
Our
costumes, props, hats, boots and any wigs for a particular play always awaited
us in the dressing-room when we arrived, made ready for us by our dresser, a
quiet, elderly man. He also looked
after one of the four dressing-rooms along from ours – 9, 10, 11, and 12. Other dressing-rooms were on the other side
of the theatre, above the Green Room, and overlooked the river.
I rejoiced in all of it – arriving at the
Stage Door, running up the stairs and along to 12a, where I sat applying
whatever make-up seemed suitable that night and then got into my costume while
the Stage Manager’s voice on the intercom announced the Half (30 minutes before
the play began).
Some 20 minutes later the names of actors,
prefaced by Mr or Miss, were summoned to the stage to take part in Act I, Scene
1. Sometimes I went below, in costume,
and stood in the wings or in the Prompt corner, savouring the smell of the
painted set and spying at what I could see of the audience, while listening to
the buzz of muted excitement and expectation that preceded every performance at
Stratford. It was an actors’ cathedral, compared with
the parish church of the Oxford Playhouse. It was
magical and wonderful, and it wasn’t at all like work, as Tomorrow’s Audience
had been. I had no lines to remember
and no responsibilities other than being on stage, in costume, at the right
time, in the company of some of the best actors in the land and in some of the
best plays ever written. It didn’t seem
real – it was a dream. It seemed as if we
were children playing a wonderful game of make-believe.
My pocket diary for May 1962 has a note
that there was a Garden Party on Wednesday, 30 May – which probably had
something to do with the town council or a charity – and that after the
performance of The Shrew that night there was a company meeting. This was followed on the Friday by a studio
meeting, which may have had something to do with the movement classes that we
were supposed to attend. These were
held in the morning in the dress circle lobby, and as they weren’t attended,
inevitably, by the leading or senior actors, what was the point of them? Less than half the company were there. So they were abandoned.
I had a few voice and singing lessons from
an elderly lady, Denne Gilkes, employed by the management, as a service, to
improve these aspects of an actor’s trade.
I absorbed some basic techniques – she taught at her rooms in the town –
and then, as the lessons were voluntary, I abandoned them. Vanessa Redgrave would later tell me that
her sessions with Denne Gilkes were invaluable. I should have persevered.
There were two performances of Measure for
Measure on Saturday, 2 June, and after the end of the second one, the set was
dismantled and stored away in the wings and John Bury’s angular, bare and
jagged set for Macbeth was erected in its place. It had a raked and uneven floor, part
rock-like and part wooden. On the
Sunday there was an extensive lighting rehearsal and costume parade, and on the
Monday morning the dress rehearsal, which extended far into the night, began –
the theatre was closed that night.
Run-throughs continued with less intensity on the Tuesday, when various
technical, prop and performance problems were sorted out.
The first night of Macbeth was at 6.30 on
Tuesday, 5 June, and was followed by three other performances over the next
three nights. On the Saturday, Measure
for Measure returned for two performances, and the following week, Macbeth
joined the other three productions already playing in the repertoire.
This production of Macbeth wasn’t met with
much critical acclaim. Richard Ingrams
reviewed it in Punch. He criticised
the direction of Donald McWhinnie as he seemed ‘deliberately to have avoided
any sensational effects’ and had ‘drained the play of its rich Elizabethan
blood,’ leaving ‘a mere ghost of Macbeth.’
He wrote, ‘The company is sound, as always, but too clean-limbed. The impression that remains is one of tall,
handsome men speaking their lines with assurance but not emerging as distinct
characters. Eric Porter’s Macbeth is
thoughtful and dignified, but like the production lacks fire … Irene Worth’s
Lady Macbeth is likewise competent though occasionally inaudible – but here
again one longs for a more sinister portrayal.’ Ingrams, I hope, wasn’t too surprised to see
my name in the cast-list and was able to identify me among the tall, handsome
men on the stage. He became the editor
of Private Eye two years later, remaining so until 1986, when he went on to
create The Oldie.
I of course was impressed by all the
performances and the whole production, though not by the director of Macbeth,
who I thought did surprisingly little directing, most of it seeming to be done
by the actors themselves. Most of
McWhinnie’s directing was in fact done from a distance. He seldom conferred with the actors on stage
– as Peter Hall and other directors did.
Irene Worth who, like Eric, had never
married, was 46 in 1962 and 13 years older than him. She was an American, and although she had
been a leading lady since 1951, when she was with the Old Vic, she was
humorously matey with all the spear-carriers and the stage-hands. Once she invited all of 12a and some others
in the cast – it must have been a Sunday – to her rented house in the town for
drinks and snacks. For some reason
David Warner was there as well. He must
have been having discussions with the management as to what parts he would play
when he joined the company the following year, after a notable debut at the
Royal Court Theatre in January 1962 (as Snout in Tony Richardson’s Dream) and
his appearance in Afore Night Come in June, all before he was 21, which he was
in July. In April 1963 he played
Trinculo in The Tempest for the RSC and then Henry VI in John Barton’s The War
of the Roses. Two years later he was
playing Hamlet.
While waiting in the wings during a
performance of Macbeth for Lady Macbeth’s entrance, as queen, at the beginning
of Act III, I was standing beside the lady, Irene Worth, herself. In her royal and golden robes and wearing a
crown she looked me up and down.
‘You’re not supposed to be higher than me,’ she hissed. I made myself smaller by lowering my head
and bending my knees. She then knelt,
as did I, facing her, and finally flattened herself on the floor, as I then had
to do. Hearing her cue she calmly got
to her feet, smoothed her robes, and sailed regally onto the stage, followed by
a servant stifling his amusement.
Another time, during that same scene, I
was standing downstage of her when, as Macbeth’s queen, she turned her head and
stared malevolently at me.
Instinctively I cringed and lowered my eyes. She evidently approved of my reaction as
later on she did this more than once, though never at quite at the same time or
in the same way.
She knew I had been at Oxford reading English and once or twice
asked me to interpret some Elizabethan nuances in the play’s text. She also asked if I had ever done any
punting at Oxford,
and when I said I had, she asked me if I would punt her and a friend down-river
for a picnic one afternoon. The friend
turned out to be Claire Bloom. She was
acting in a film called The Haunting, whose location scenes were being shot at
Ettington Hall, a Gothic mansion near Stratford
– a wonderfully scary movie, much better than the remake.
Claire Bloom was a film star, having been
chosen by Charlie Chaplin to appear in his film, Limelight, in 1952, when she
was 21. She had acted at the Old Vic
and in several well-regarded films and West End
plays. I had seen her at the Edinburgh
Festival in August 1953, when she played Ophelia to Richard Burton’s
Hamlet. I had never met a real film
star before and I was agog.
Irene provided a picnic basket and some
rugs and hired a punt for a couple of hours from a boat-hire place near the
front of the theatre and we set off.
The ladies reclined on cushioned seats and I stood at the rear end,
carefully sliding the long pole into the Avon, guiding us through the arches of
the bridge and so down-river while they spread their skirts and trailed their
fingers in the water and surveyed the river views. It was
a novel situation – floating down the river on a Friday afternoon with Ophelia
and Lady Macbeth.
After what seemed a long time – my arms and
shoulders were beginning to ache -- Irene decided that a field on our left
would be perfect for a picnic, so I poled the punt into the bank, and held it
there with the pole while Irene tied the front end to a tree. She chose a place where the rugs might be
spread and the picnic began.
It wasn’t the country idyll that Irene had
probably imagined. The grass was thick
and rank, the field had obviously been used as a toilet by cows, and there were
thistles, flies, wasps and ants. But it
was a mild and sunny day. The other two
virtually ignored me, and I, as their humble servitor or swain, said nothing
unless they spoke to me. They gossiped
about plays and theatre people, all mostly unknown to me, and the novelty of
the outing having soon worn off, we packed up and returned to the punt. Heading back up-river against the flow was
more strenuous than drifting downstream and required some skill in preventing
the punt from slipping sideways or even sliding back. And then Irene decided she wanted to pick
some flowers growing on the bank.
These flowers were on a bush at the bottom
of someone’s garden. With difficulty I
poled the punt into the left-hand bank and jammed us there, using the pole as a
lever. Irene manoeuvred herself onto
the front of the punt – Claire Bloom was reclining below me – reached out, and
in order to seize the desired flowers, stepped onto the bank. Whereupon she slid off it, suddenly and gracefully,
and sank into the river. And there was
Lady Macbeth standing in the River Avon with its water above her knees. And she had to appear on stage that night!
There was nothing I could do, as I had to
hold the punt to prevent her from slipping further into the water and being
dragged down to a muddy death. As I
struggled to keep the punt beside the bank so that Irene could get back on
board, Claire Bloom scrambled to the other end to assist her. Somehow Irene succeeded in getting back onto
the punt without her and Claire falling into the river, and somehow I succeeded
in poling them safely back to some steps below the Green Room, while Irene, who
thought it was all immensely amusing, laughed a lot.
Shaken
by visions of what might have happened, of the show that night having to be
cancelled, of both Ophelia and Lady Macbeth floating down the river, I retired
to the nearest pub.
Judi Dench was already acting in both The
Dream and Measure for Measure when I joined the company and so I didn’t have
much to do with her. Two years older
than me she had starred in the 1960-61 Old Vic season and in 1962 had played
Anya in The Cherry Orchard at the Aldwych Theatre, alongside John Gielgud,
Peggy Ashcroft, Dorothy Tutin and Ian Holm.
This was the first RSC production to be televised in its entirety by the
BBC.
I thought she was wonderful as Titania
and Isabella. Every word she spoke in
her characteristically choked voice with a crack in it was crystal clear. As Titania she was childishly wilful,
running about bare-footed in a glittering costume and grey wig and adoring
Bottom (Paul Hardwick) as if he were her pet.
As Isabella she was strongly virtuous.
I remember her outrage at Ian Holm’s Claudio when he pleaded with her to
lose her virginity so that he might escape being executed. She cried out, ‘Oh, you beast!’ However, Harold Hobson thought ‘the
glowingly robust Isabella of Judi Dench was more fitted to the breezy pastures
of East Anglia
than to the cold seclusion of a convent.’
Another critic said, ‘She very cleverly plays down the prig, but doesn’t
for me suggest the sense of vocation or the temptingly innocent child of
nature.’
She could be playful offstage as well as
on. One night we seven soldiers were
standing in our semi-circle at the back of the stage, rigidly clasping the
poles of our banners and dutifully attending to the complicated machinations of
Tom Fleming’s Duke in the last long Act V of Measure for Measure, when there
came a soft ‘Psst!’ from the soldier on my left. Isabella had just been taken offstage, and
was supposedly on her way to prison. I
glanced his way, wondering what might be amiss and saw, beyond him, Judi Dench,
wearing red bloomers, doing a can-can in the wings to entertain us. A strong breeze suddenly seemed to agitate
the banners and the soldiery stared ahead with very inappropriate smirks.
It was again in Act V that something
unexpected happened that became the stuff of RSC legend for several years.
An extra matinee of Measure for Measure
had been added to the repertoire, possibly for some school or society, and as
the last two scenes of Act IV were being played out on stage, I lined up in the
wings with the other six soldiers carrying our banners, as the Duke, no longer
posing as a friar, gave Friar Peter various instructions about certain
revelations soon to be made. We heard
him but, unsighted by the wings, were unaware that he was talking to
himself. For Friar Peter wasn’t
there.
A Stage Manager suddenly appeared beside
me. ‘You’re the understudy for Friar Peter?’
he whispered. ‘Er, yes,’ I said. ‘You’re on,’ he said. He
dragged me out of the line-up of soldiers towards the Prompt corner, where I
was divested of my furry hat and banner and thrust into Friar Peter’s
costume.
What had happened was that Michael Murray,
who was playing Friar Peter, had forgotten about the extra matinee and was
sunbathing in his garden. His absence
wasn’t noted as he didn’t appear until the end of the play -- not until the
Duke stalked onto the stage to deliver his instructions and found himself to be
alone. Tom Fleming strode about for a
bit, making questioning faces at the Prompt corner and then, as Friar Peter had
just one line to say – ‘It shall be speeded well’ – Tom Fleming boldly began
listing the instructions as if he were reminding himself about what had to be
done. Meanwhile, a distraught SM had
checked with the Stage Door as to whether Murray
had arrived there earlier (he hadn’t), had unearthed the name of Friar Peter’s
understudy and sent an ASM to run and fetch Murray’s cassock from his dressing-room.
‘Do you know what to do?’ inquired the
SM. ‘Er, yes,’ I said, having watched
this scene as a soldier. ‘Do you know
the words?’ ‘Er, no,’ I said, feeling
doomed. There had been no understudy
rehearsal of this scene since I arrived.
‘I know the beginning,’ I volunteered.
The SM somehow produced the relevant text of Friar Peter’s speeches torn
from a book and thrust it into my hand.
He then thrust me, on the edge of a nightmare, through a curtain onto
the stage.
Fortunately, Isabella and Mariana (Judi
Dench and Yvonne Bonnamy) were downstage left, right beside the Prompt corner,
and not on the other side of the stage.
Friar Peter should have been with them as they went over the
instructions they had been given by the Duke, and fortunately the Friar’s
six-line speech that followed this had been cut. So when I suddenly appeared behind them, they
both glanced at me, briefly bug-eyed, and, seemingly unfazed by what and whom
they saw, turned their attention to the stage, where the Duke, Angelo, Escalus,
Lucio, the Provost and the soldiers (minus one) had now assembled. The Duke (Tom Fleming) greeted Angelo
(Marius Goring) and Escalus (Peter Jeffrey) in a brace of speeches and invited
them to walk with him, ending with ‘And good supporters are you.’ This was my cue to say to Isabella, ‘Now is
your time. Speak loud, and kneel before him.’ Whereupon she did as bidden, ran forward and
knelt before the Duke.
Unfortunately, Mariana chose to say my line,
in case I didn’t know it. So we spoke
together – ‘Now is your time …’ after which I let her say the rest. By this time all the others on the stage had
become aware that someone other than Michael Murray was lurking downstage left,
behind Mariana, and as Isabella and the Duke, with interpolations by Lucio (Ian
Richardson), played out the scene, I studied the torn and crumpled page in the
palm of my right hand, my back to the audience, firing myself up for Friar
Peter’s big moment in the play – and mine.
All at once Lucio spoke my cue and I
rushed forward and, centre-stage, knelt before the Duke, still with my back to
the audience and now facing the rest of the cast. Tom Fleming stared down at me with eyebrows
raised, and Ian Richardson gave me a rather camp look, as if saying, ‘Mmn …
What have we here?’ What they saw was a
very tall, dishevelled person with rumpled hair, wearing a very short
ill-fitting cassock and hairy soldiers’ boots.
‘Blessed be your royal grace!’ I yelled.
Never having spoken on this stage before
an audience, unaccustomed to the acoustics and facing upstage, I
overcompensated vocally. ‘I have stood by, my lord, and I have heard
your royal ear abused,’ I yelled. I continued
to abuse his ears when he questioned me.
This bit I knew. But then Lucio,
imitating me, loudly cued the bit I didn’t know. Looking down, without seeming to look down,
at the scrap of paper in my right hand, I continued, strongly, for 12 more lines,
after which I sidled to one side as Isabella was taken offstage by the Provost
(Paul Hardwick) and Mariana came forward, during which Tom Fleming turned to
Marius Goring and said, ‘Do you not smile at this, Lord Angelo?’
There
was now a bit of a ding-dong between the Duke, Mariana and Lucio, which ended
when I spoke four lines announcing that the Provost knew where Friar Lodowick
(alias the Duke in disguise) was lodged.
Thus disguised, he returned, and verbal altercations ensued until he was
revealed to be the Duke, whereupon he began unravelling the plot and ordered me
to marry Mariana to Angelo ‘instantly’.
The three of us retired to the rear of the stage, where the other two
knelt, backs to the audience, while I blessed them with what I hoped were mystic
and prayerful gestures. They returned
downstage and the Duke brought the proceedings, and the play, to an end. We all exited left and right and the
remaining six soldiers slowly managed to lower their banners withoutb a tremor as
the lights dimmed and went to black.
I stood in the wings, traumatised and
breathing heavily, as the audience applauded.
The lights flooded the stage again and the cast returned to take a bow. Tony Church, who was playing Barnardine,
seized my hand and dragged me onto the stage to take my bow with the rest. And that was that – my first appearance in a
character role with the RSC.
There
weren’t any ructions, nor any, I think, directed at Michael Murray. Some joked about it and some said ‘Well
done.’ Most did both. That night I thankfully returned to being an
obscure soldier holding a banner and Murray
to being Friar Peter, though never again would the part be played with such
unexpected volume and dramatic effect.
The experience, however, became the theme of bad dreams in later years,
when, filled with apprehension and dread, I would be in a play not knowing what
I was supposed to say or do and with others wondering what I was doing there.
During the season I went on as an
understudy again, twice, but this time with some warning. The audience arriving for a performance of
Measure for Measure one night were no doubt disappointed to find a note in
their programmes which said, ‘Owing to the indisposition of Mr Ian Richardson
there will be the following changes of cast.’
Ian Cullen, who was from County
Durham, would play Lucio
and I would take over Cullen’s role as Second Gentleman. The First Gentleman was Richard Barr. We appeared in Act I Scene 2 and were
supposed to be rather rakish student-like idlers about town.
As it happened I had played the very same
Second Gent in the OUDS production of Measure for Measure two years ago and had
no difficulty in remembering my lines. However, it was a bit of a strain for Ian
Cullen taking on Ian Richardson’s excellent characterisation and for Richard
Barr, the First Gent, having to deal with two understudies at the same
time. There was nothing clever about my
characterisation. I rehashed what I remembered of my Second
Gent in Oxford
and concentrated on picking up my cues and clearly saying and projecting what I
was supposed to say. Cullen’s costume,
which I had to wear, was a bit of a squeeze, as he was shorter than me. In Act V I thankfully reappeared as a
soldier once again.
The other understudy appearance I can
hardly remember, except for the fact that a programme slip, which said that owing
to the indisposition of Mr Hugh Sullivan his part as one of the Scottish lords in
Macbeth would be played by another lord, Angus, and that Angus would be played
by Bryan Reed, who normally played a Messenger.
This meant that I had to rush on
in Bryan’s
place as an agitated Messenger and warn Lady Macduff and her Son about her
imminent danger – Macbeth’s murderers were heading her way -- and urge her to
flee. I had just enough time before
this to divest myself of my golden robes as the Eighth Apparition and transform
myself, two scenes later, into a sweaty Messenger. My agitation at having to remember and make
a nine-line speech was real, as was my sweatiness, and my scared and panicky appearance
duly alarmed Diana Rigg, who cried out as I cravenly abandoned her and fled
offstage, ‘Whither should I fly?’
One night Macbeth lived up to its unlucky
reputation when Bill Travers’ sword sliced into Eric Porter’s hand during their
fight to the death at the end. Luckily,
as he died offstage, only his head had to reappear. Dripping blood Eric took his curtain call
and then was carted off to hospital.
This must have happened on Thursday, 14 June, as the last time the play
ran on consecutive nights was on that Thursday and Friday. It was assumed that his understudy, Tony
Steedman, would have to go on in his place.
But the understudy didn’t know all the words it seems. So Eric, bandaged and wearing a glove,
returned to the stage. But from then on
he and Macduff fought with wooden swords.
Eric was 33 (he looked older) and had been
with the RSC since 1960, when he made his name in the title role of
Becket. Later on he was in BBC TV’s
1967 version of The Forsyte Saga (as Soames), and then in Granada’s The Jewel in the Crown. He also appeared in several film epics. He
could be playful. In rehearsal he
indulged himself by now and then altering the punctuation and emphasis of some
of the lines. For instance, instead of
‘with an indissoluble tie for ever knit’, he would say, ‘with an indissoluble
tie for ever, nit!’ And when Donalbain
rushed on, saying, ‘What is amiss?’
Eric replied, with a camp gesture, ‘You are – and do not know it.’ Brian Murray as Malcolm had some awkward
lines to say – ‘Cousins, I hope the days are near at hand that chambers will be
safe.’ However, the most impossible line,
spoken by a Servant in Richard II, must be -- ‘An hour before I came, the
Duchess died.’
Later on in the season Eric invited me to
have dinner at his rented house north of Stratford. It was furnished in a manorial style, with
shaded lamps and panelling. He had a
Chinese houseboy, called Tony, who made and served the meal. I wish I could recall the tales Eric must
have told about people he had worked with and productions he’d been in. All I remember is that I stayed the night,
as Eric couldn’t drink and drive and I couldn’t afford a taxi. I was in bed, reading, when the Chinese
houseboy came into my bedroom and asked me if there was anything he could do
for me (or words to that effect). I
should have said, ‘F – off,’ or words to that effect. But not being in the habit of using
four-letter words, apart from ‘Gosh,’ ‘Drat,’ and ‘Damn,’ I politely told him I
didn’t need anything, thank you. He
went away, and nothing was said the following morning. For the record, I only began using the F
word, when appropriate, in my fifties, but never the C and S words.
Alan
Webb, who joined the company in August and played Gloucester in King Lear, once asked me out
for dinner in a local restaurant. He
was 56 and seemed very old to me. If I
hadn’t been so self-conscious and self-absorbed I might have asked him, as with
Eric, about his diverse theatrical career – he’d been at Stratford with Olivier
and Vivien Leigh in 1955, had acted on Broadway and had been directed by Noel
Coward and Orson Welles. He’d also
served in the Royal Navy. But I didn’t
ask him about what he’d done. Instead
he kindly inquired about what I had done, about Oxford
and India,
and about my non-existent career.
The only other time I dined out, and away
from Stratford,
was when I had dinner with Murray Brown and Thane Bettany in their cosy
thatched-roof cottage in the Cotswolds.
Murray was a New Zealander and was
employed in Stratford
as a stage-hand. He and Thane had met
in New Zealand
when both were acting with the New Zealand Players. They became an item, the first such liaison I’d
encountered. Before this, in 1958,
Thane had played Osric to Michael Redgrave’s Hamlet at Stratford and then was Ferdinand in The
Tempest, with Gielgud as Prospero.
Thane married in 1970 and in due course fathered the film actor, Paul
Bettany. I don’t know what happened to
Murray Brown.
I’ve always liked New Zealanders – it must
be because most used to have Scottish origins.
The ones I’ve got to know are so laid back and relaxed, and even more
egalitarian than Australians.
At other times I was visited at Stratford by friends from Oxford, and by my mother. But which plays she saw, and when, I can’t
remember. I expect she told her
neighbours in the audience that a particularly tall servant or soldier was her son. Although I was able to provide her with good
house seats and pay for a meal or two, I didn’t have the funds to pay for her
lodging or her journey to Stratford
by train. I hope I found the time to
show her around the theatre. I recall
that she seemed subdued -- perhaps because she was in England and I
performing in such a famous institution.
Perhaps because she wasn’t well.
Peter Holmes, formerly Tamburlaine and now
an actor, once drove up to Stratford
with a girl-friend, Georgina Ward, an ex-debutante and budding actress, and an
ex-girl-friend of Tony Armstrong-Jones, who had married Princess Margaret in
May 1960 and about whom she had a scandalous tale to tell. In time I realised that there were
scandalous tales to tell about most people in the public eye, and that
everyone, well, nearly everyone, was up to something they wouldn’t want others
to know about.
Sid Bradley turned up one day in September
to see Cymbeline and to tell me that he was engaged to the Danish girl, called
Mette, who’d been at St Clare’s -- and that they would marry in Denmark the
following summer. That was a
shock. I had presumed that although we
would lead independent lives we would one day live together, once our careers
had been defined – a foolishly fond and unrealistic expectation. In the event I wasn’t asked to be best man,
or invited to the wedding. I was jobless at the time and probably wasn’t
respectable enough for the bride’s very respectable middle-class Danish family,
whose guest-list was exclusively Danish. Sid’s mother and brother weren’t invited
either. After the wedding Sid moved in September 1963 with
his wife to London,
where he’d obtained a job as an English lecturer at King’s College. They lived in assorted rented digs for a
several years.
AD also came to Stratford.
She was holidaying with Harold Barry’s elderly sister, Kathleen. They were staying in the Cotswolds at
Burford and chose to arrive on a day in June when I wasn’t on stage. As Kathleen had no interest in seeing any of
the plays, I entertained her while AD attended a matinee of The Dream. Before the play began I showed AD around
backstage.
She wrote in her Memories, ‘It was a
tremendous thrill when I saw the dressing-rooms of the stars and some of the
magnificent costumes that they wore.
Gordon asked if I would like to have a look at the stage. I excitedly replied, “Oh, yes, please. I’d love to!”
It was still some hours before the matinee began: the theatre was in
semi-darkness and the stage deserted and dimly lit. But there was an atmosphere about the place
that excited me. As I walked onto and
across the stage and gazed around me my thoughts were full of the days long ago
when my one great ambition had been to embark on a successful stage
career. Alas, for one reason and
another, this never became a reality … I think that from that day I became even
more interested in Gordon’s future career.
I felt I could relate in so many ways to his aspirations … In the
afternoon I sat in the theatre enthralled, watching Peter Hall’s magnificent
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I never once thought to wonder how Gordon was managing to entertain
Kathleen!’ I wonder too.
It was during the summer that I had a
mishap with a baby. I had become
friendly with Martin Best, one of the RSC musicians who featured in some of the
plays. Tall and dark-haired he was a
classical guitarist, who had the annoying and unnecessary habit, as it seemed
to me, of playing and singing with his eyes closed. He had a young wife, Sue, and a baby, and
one morning she gave me a lift in their car to Leamington Spa, where I was
going to catch a train to Oxford or London. As it was a rainy day I was wearing a cheap,
black plastic mac, and as there were no seat-belts in those days, I sat in the
passenger seat with my hands tightly embracing the baby, which sat in my lap,
seemingly content to observe the forward view. All of a sudden it puked, to our mutual
surprise. Its puke slid slowly down
the plastic of the mac and nestled into my crutch, seeping into my trousers and
underpants. Sue took some time to pull
over into the kerb, mainly because she was giggling so much. I passed the baby over to her and very
carefully got out of the car, after she had handed me some tissues. Partly concealed by a tree I removed my
shoes, the mac, my trousers and underpants, and wiped the trousers,
imperfectly, gingerly putting them on again after dumping the soiled underpants
and the mac behind the tree. Minus
both I was driven to the station, the seat and my trousers covered with tissues
in case the baby puked again. It
didn’t, and I walked into the station with a sailor’s rolling gait. I smelt faintly of puke all the way to my
destination, and sat damply in second class avoiding people’s eyes.
Rehearsals for Cymbeline began on Monday,
18 June. The play was directed by Bill
Gaskill, who had directed The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Aldwych Theatre. When the cast-list was posted on the notice
board at the Stage Door, I was chuffed to see that I was down to play a Lord
attending on Cymbeline, King of Britain (Tom Fleming). Not only that, I had something to say – one
and a half lines. All of us in 12a were
playing very minor featured roles, as well as lords and soldiers, apart from
Ian Hewitson and Ian Lindsay. I was
also down to understudy Posthumus Leonatus, husband of Imogen, Cymbeline’s
daughter. She was played by Vanessa
Redgrave and Posthumus by Patrick Allen.
I
was clearly chosen because of my height, as Vanessa was six feet tall in shoes
– Patrick Allen was an inch taller.
Fortunately I never had to go on in his place, as I didn’t know all the
words, and when he left the company, towards the end of the season, his part
was taken, to my great surprise, and chagrin, by a former Oxford undergraduate, with whom I’d acted
more than once -- none other than Ian McCulloch. This meant that I was now understudying
him.
Like me, Ian had never been to a drama
school and now he was acting opposite Vanessa Redgrave. He even had to embrace and kiss her. How did
it happen? Ian told an interviewer in
1994 or so, ‘In my penultimate term at Oxford
someone recommended me to George Devine, who was then running the Royal Court
Theatre, and he in turn
recommended me to the RSC. The upshot
was that with a term still to do at Oxford
I was offered a long-term contract with the RSC. I sat
my last exam in Oxford on a Wednesday morning
and in the afternoon I was rehearsing with Vanessa Redgrave, Eric Porter and
others at Stratford. It was a wonderful start, but I’m afraid I
didn’t really do myself justice. The
main criticism of me was that I was diffident.
I thought that meant difficult.’
For whatever reasons Ian never played any
other roles with the RSC, although he went on to play many parts in TV plays
and series, notably Survivors on BBC TV, and appeared in some horror films.
Cymbeline is a very odd play, rather like
a fairy-tale, with a wicked stepmother, disguises, deceptions, apparitions, Romans
and Britons, and Jupiter descending from above on an eagle. Imogen, thought to be dead by her brothers,
who were stolen when babies and brought up in the wild, wakes up to find a
headless corpse beside her. She thinks
it is her husband, Posthumus, and breaks down in tears. Vanessa wept real tears of course and,
sobbing, had to say and wail such impossible lines as – ‘This is his hand, his
foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh, the brawns of Hercules, but his Jovial face
– Murder in heaven! – How? Tis gone! …
Alas, where is thy head? Where’s that?’ I’m afraid some of the audience used to
laugh.
Some of the stagehands used to gather in
the wings to witness another aspect of Vanessa’s total commitment to a
part. Act II Scene 2 was set in Imogen’s
bedchamber, and in the black-out before the scene, a big bed was brought on
stage and I and Bryan Reed struggled on with a big and heavy trunk, which we
parked near the bed. Out of the trunk,
once Imogen had gone to sleep, crept the evil Iachimo, played by Eric
Porter. He had to pretend that he had
slept with her and so he not only made notes about the details of the
bedchamber, like the arras, windows, pictures, etc, but, after removing a
bracelet from her wrist, noted that she had ‘a mole cinque-spotted’ on her left
breast. True to Shakespeare and her
art, Vanessa lay on the bed with her left breast exposed on which she had
painted a pretty little mole, and this was duly observed by Eric, by the
stagehands, and me.
It was in the following scene that my big
moment came. I had to enter as a
Messenger from downstage right, and announce before Cymbeline, the Queen,
Cloten and his two Lords, ‘So like you, sir, ambassadors from Rome, the one is
Caius Lucius.’ There were many ways of
saying this. I chose to say it as if I
were making a station announcement.
The Dress Rehearsal for Cymbeline was on
Monday 16 July and the First Night was at 6.30 pm the following day. The production was quite well received. As a Lord I had been given an olive-green
long-sleeved robe to wear, matching leather boots and a tall hat, and once
again I had to carry a big banner and flourish it as the British army advanced
on the Roman army. One night as we
entered upstage left and swept past the vast cyclorama at the back of the stage,
which was faced with netting, the topmost point of the banner tangled in the
netting and couldn’t be dislodged. I
tugged at it fiercely but cautiously, fearing that if I was too violent the netting
of the cyclorama would be torn and might collapse. Meanwhile, the British army moved on. After one last frantic twist and tug the
banner freed itself. I sped after the
others, hoping that no one, onstage and in the audience, had noticed my silent
struggle with the banner at the back of the stage.
Then, later on in the season, at a
matinee, everyone who was on stage noticed that I wasn’t there when I should
have been.
After Bryan Reed and I had deposited Eric
in the trunk in Imogen’s bedchamber, and without checking to see whether Vanessa’s
mole was adorning her breast, I hurried back to the Green Room to continue
playing cards with Peter Jeffrey and two others. Somehow I never heard the tannoyed
announcement by the SM of my name in advance of my next appearace – I must have
been losing – until someone said, ‘Wasn’t that your cue?’
I leapt up and rushed along to the wings
downstage right. Too late. Tom Fleming was into the speech that
followed my announcement.
I couldn’t face them when they exited and I
retreated to the Green Room, expecting to be thrown out of the company on the
spot. I had only one line to say and I
hadn’t gone on to say it. There was no
excuse – I had been playing cards and missed my cue. I could only apologise, but how and to
whom? I felt ill. It was Peter Jeffrey or Ian Richardson who
said, ‘You should apologise to everyone who was on the stage at the time.’ So I did, cringing from dressing-room to
dressing-room and including the SM and ASM in my abject tour. No one seemed very concerned, and nothing
further was said or done. It transpired
that Ian Richardson, one of Cloten’s lords, not seeing me in the wings waiting
to come on, had peered offstage and, as if seeing the ambassadors from Rome
approaching, had graciously passed on the information to Cymbeline.
He was charmingly dismissive when I
thanked him. Ian was in all the plays
staged by the RSC that season, all except the next one, King Lear. Two years older than me, he was a Scot,
having been born and educated in Edinburgh
(at Heriot’s), and was married to Maroussia Frank, who played minor roles in
the company. They had been with the
company since 1960 and had two sons.
Ian had also been an announcer with BFBS (the British Forces Broadcasting
Service) during his National Service.
Whether the fact that I was three-quarters Scottish, despite the ancient
English surname, was relevant I don’t know, but I always empathised with Scots,
appreciating their honesty, humorous directness and unselfish
friendliness. Ian was also to me the
most professional male actor in the company, an actor’s actor. He had a clear and ringing voice, and
although everything he did and said was calculated, his characterisations were
not just effective but true.
I learned something about the business of
being an actor by listening to him on stage and watching him. He played to the audience and for the
audience, not solely, as the fashion is now, to and for the other actors on the
stage. As Oberon in The Dream, when he
came to the speech beginning, ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,’ he
stood stock-still centre stage, and with Puck (Ian Holm) crouching beside him,
spoke the lines at the audience. I
asked him what he was looking at. ‘The
front of the dress circle,’ he said.
‘Keeps your head up and then everyone can hear you.’ It was what I had crudely and instinctively
done with John of Gaunt in Lyons. The magical and compelling moments in a
theatre are when an actor, or singer, faces an audience and performs for them
alone.
After that season with the RSC at Stratford, I never saw Ian again, not for 40 years, until
he came to Perth in Western Australia for a few performances of
The Hollow Crown in the Perth Concert Hall in April 2002. I met up with him and Diana Rigg after the
show, as well as with Derek Jacobi and Donald Sinden (neither of whom had I ever
met). It was a joy being with such
actors once again, basking in their vitality and lively wit. The
best actors are usually the nicest, and so it was with them.
During rehearsals of Cymbeline I had given
the tickets I had acquired for the College Dance at Univ on 22 June to Brian
and Diana. I couldn’t go as Measure for
Measure was on that night. I believe
they enjoyed themselves.
Diana, although born in Yorkshire, in
1938, had also been a child in India
during the war. I always thought she
resembled Cliff Richard, who was born in India and had Anglo-Indian origins,
and that they should have played Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night. She was a very expressive lady, and flung
her voice and hands about with much abandon.
When being thoughtful, she constantlky twisted strands of her dark
auburn hair around a finger. She once
said to me, ‘Does my body fill you with desire?’ When I replied, speaking honestly, ‘Well, no,’
she wasn’t pleased. She tossed her head and waved a hand
dismissively. On another occasion, when we were walking
back to our digs after a party, I imaginatively remarked that the yellow half
moon low down in the sky was like a Meltis Fruit. ‘A
Meltis Fruit!’ she exclaimed, laughing, ‘Oh, you’re so romantic!’ A catty American critic once said some years
later of her performance in Abelard and Eloise on Broadway that Diana was ‘built
like a brick basilica with insufficient flying buttresses.’ Unfair (and untrue). Diana was wonderfully histrionic and comical
as Helena in The Dream at Stratford, and later on she was an ideal Emma
Peel in The Avengers on TV. She is to
be seen as her most camp and extravagant self in the Agatha Christie film, Evil
under the Sun (1982).
She also married James Bond in an early
Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). She actually
married Archie Stirling (her second husband), whose father, William Stirling of
Keir House, where Thackeray and Chopin had stayed, was coincidentally born in
Bridge of Allan in 1911 – my mother’s father, Dr Fraser, assisting at the
birth. Archie Stirling, a former Scots
Guards officer and a nephew of David Stirling, who founded the SAS, became
Laird of Keir in due course.
Vanessa,
who had also played Helena
for the RSC, was now playing Katharina in The Shrew and couldn’t help making
the character softer, more sympathetic and ultimately more loving than a shrew
should be. I believe that some of her
excellence as an actress is and was due to the fact that she was
short-sighted. For I once saw her
peering very closely into a tray of props in the wings, her eyes within inches
of them, and concluded that one reason for her joyous response to the men on
stage whom her character loved was that they were a blur. Her imagination made them into real objects
of adoration.
I once danced the twist with Vanessa at a bottle
party in someone’s house in Stratford. At another posher party, wearing my kilt, I
danced the twist with Leslie Caron, who had married Peter Hall in 1956 and had
starred in Gigi in 1958. This was at the
Halls’ home in Stratford. She was five years older than me and in 1955
had danced with Fred Astaire in the film Daddy Long Legs. Now I was dancing with the girl who had
danced with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
It seems to me that there can be less than six
degrees of separation, often three, or less.
We all seem to connect somewhere
at some point in time, did we but know it.
Paul Scofield, who was soon to
appear at Stratford as King Lear, would soon be seen in an excellent film, The
Train, with Burt Lancaster, and he had acted more than once with Kirk Douglas,
my most admired film star, who before I joined the RSC had already appeared in
Lust for Life, The Vikings and Spartacus.
So only two and three degrees of separation were here involved. But one day there were zero degrees of
separation. In 1988 Kirk Douglas came
to TV-am to promote his autobiography.
I boldly invaded the Green Room where he was awaiting his appearance,
said how much I admired him and told him it was my birthday -- I was 52. He
said, with a wide grin, ‘Congratulations!
I hope I look as good as you when I’m your age.’ He was 71.
I can’t recall any more about these parties at
Stratford, of
which there were a few, as I tended to drink too much wine. At the Dirty Duck, because I was permanently
short of money, I drank halves of beer, and as I couldn’t afford to become
involved in buying rounds, I left the Duck before the others.
It was at the Duck one night, after a
performance of Cymbeline, that I shared a slightly spooky experience with
Vanessa. She had gone outside to get
some fresh air or look at the stars and returned a few minutes later, saying,
‘Come outside – there’s something moving in the sky.’ A few of us wandered out onto the raised
stone deck at the front of the Duck and she pointed at the stars – ‘There -- up
there. Is that a shooting star, or a
comet?’ Almost directly overhead and
moving slowly southwards was a wandering speck of light. I had to focus my gaze on it to see that it
was actually moving past other stars.
‘What is it?’ Vanessa wanted to know.
The Russians had sent up their first Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the
Americans their Explorers the following year.
I suggested that it could be one of them -- ‘Or the start of an invasion
from Mars.’ The others went back inside
the Duck, and for a while Vanessa and I gazed up at this minuscule moving star,
imagining what it might be, and never for a second did I know or imagine that I
was standing beside one of the brightest future stars of stage and screen.
Nor
did I realise that the sixth play to be staged in the RSC season that year
would be one of the most acclaimed and celebrated productions of King Lear in
living memory. It was a long way from
the Edinburgh Academy’s Lear.
Rehearsals began in a leisurely fashion
after the August Bank Holiday. The
director was Peter Brook. A Russian Jew
ancestrally, who had been at Magdalen
College in Oxford during the war, he was now 37 and had been directing plays
since he was 21, and since 1947 had directed four plays at the Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre, most notably Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus in
1955. Brook was a solid little man,
with paw-like hands and pale blue beady eyes.
Elizabeth Seal, whom he directed in the musical Irma la Douce in 1959,
said of him, ‘When he’s difficult, he’s steely, the twinkle goes out of those
blue eyes … He’s quite manipulative and domineering.’ As with Peter Hall, Brook spent a great deal
of time with the leading actors on stage discussing their roles and the text,
while we extras hung about. He didn’t
bother with any interpretation of our parts with us.
Once again I had a line to say and was
billed at the bottom of a distinguished cast-list as Second British
Captain. The First Captain was Ian
Hewitson, and once again all seven of us in 12a were in the same production, as
servants and Lear’s knights. As the
latter we were encouraged by Brook to be violently riotous towards the end of
Act I when Lear, enraged by Goneril, overturned a table, shouting, ‘Darkness
and devils!’ A chair was smashed and
benches, chairs and tankards thrown about by us with considerable enjoyment.
As his ‘disordered rabble’ we wore leather
tabards over our basic grey-green tunics and trousers, along with supple
leather boots. I also wore my wig. Most of the cast had expensive leather
costumes, but at the costume parade Brook was so displeased with how they
looked, like shiny plastic, that he ordered them all, including the principal’s
costumes, to be roughened up and their surfaces scratched and soiled. The set was monolithic, basic, with props
made of metal and wood. In Act I Scene
2 John Corvin and I had to wheel onto
the stage a broad dais on which was Lear’s throne, backed by a metal oval like
a giant egg. It was secured
centre-stage by the use of foot-brakes.
In the storm scenes a barren stage and a bare back-cloth portrayed the
heath, and sounds of stormy wind and rain were enforced by three large oblong
metal sheets, which descended from the flies and were wired to vibrate and add
to the thunder.
Paul Scofield was Lear. He was only 40, but with his lined and
care-worn face, his greying hair and grizzled beard, he looked years older, and
he had the most extraordinary voice, gravelly but very clear. I had never seen him act, and it wasn’t
until the play transferred to the Aldwych that I became aware that I was
witnessing what his RSC peers would say in 2004 was ‘the greatest Shakespearean
performance ever.’
But all the leading roles excelled
themselves -- with Tom Fleming as Kent, Alan Webb as Gloucester, Alec McCowen
as the Fool, Peter Jeffrey and Tony Church as the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall,
and Brian Murray as Edgar. Even James
Booth, as a shifty, spivvish Edmund did well.
In Edmund’s sword-fight with Edgar at the end, I was Edmund’s Captain
and handed his helmet and a huge sword to him.
When he died, on stage, later on, I announced his death. This wasn’t easy after nearly four hours of
powerful tragedy, my five word announcement – ‘Edmund is dead, my lord,’
interrupting the climactic moments leading to Lear’s last speech and death, and
eliciting Albany’s scathing put-down, ‘That’s but a trifle here!’ Besides, James Booth usually didn’t play
dead. He lay on his back, open--eyed,
inspecting the lights and darkness of the flies far above his head.
It pleased me that my mate, Irene Worth,
essayed my erstwhile role as Goneril.
Patience Collier was Regan, and Diana Rigg Cordelia. I believe that the role of Cordelia was
originally going to be played by Virginia McKenna, Bill Travers’ wife and star
of films like Born Free and A Town Like Alice, but she was taken ill, and Diana
filled in for her, as she did in the last production of the season, which
followed Lear.
The First Night was at 6.30 on Tuesday, 11
September. The one interval, of 15
minutes, was two hours later, and the performance ended about 10.20 pm. In his review, JC Trewin, drama critic of
the Birmingham Post, had this to say.
‘The Stratford
stage is surrounded by tall, coarse-textured off-white screens. Against these are variously disposed shapes
of metal that look as if they have been raised, in their rust, from the sea
depths … Brook asks always for our imagination. Consider the storm scene: a bare stage, the
slow descent of what resemble three bleak rusted metal banners that aid the
thunder’s reverberation, the appearance of men crouching and huddling against
the storm, and the sight of Paul Scofield’s Lear striding and lunging on
through the gale. There he defies the
elements with a mighty sustained cry of “Blow, winds!” … The storm is in Lear’s
voice. It is also in Lear’s mind. He is identified with its fury. The proud, rigid monarch of the first scene
has vanished; in bewilderment, passion, grief, Lear becomes the soul of agony …
I responded, as ever, to the actor’s overmastering pathos …
‘Let
me try to express what we saw tonight in that first testing scene that must set
the note of the play. Lear, King of
Britain, a figure of rigid, cold arrogance, set in tarnished gold, his hands
clenched upon the arms of a crudely fashioned throne. He was framed against a huge elliptical
shield, a rusty shape that seemed to act as a sounding board for Scofield’s
unforgettable voice. It was the voice
of an old man, but a man not yet infirm, a ruler still in command … Certain
vowels could have a strange, rough nasality … It was the voice of a man to be
feared … Royal Lear sat crowned and erect, a figure from a primeval – almost,
it might be, a rusting Iron Age … Later we found Lear among his knights: his
cropped head was bare, his eyes – how eyesight haunts one throughout the
tragedy – were wide and restless … When he came to deliver the curse upon
Goneril he stood behind an overturned table and then advanced upon her as he
flailed her with his curse … Later, the hovel scene, the colloquy with blinded
Gloucester, the recognition of Cordelia (Lear like a frail, grey ghost), the
ultimate heartbreak in that fearful consciousness of death (with the quadruple
“Howl!” and the quintuple “Never”) were carried through with a power in which
Lear remained recognisably the man we had met at first … Brook asks –
especially in the second half – for an empty stage and the full rigour of the
tragedy. I do not think that many who
were at Stratford tonight will forget the scene:
for Scofield and Alan Webb, Lear and Gloucester,
were helped only by the majesty of the word in the middle of that vast bare
stage.’
The stage was even emptier at the end,
after the bodies of Lear, Cordelia and Edmund were removed on Albany’s order, ‘Bear them from hence!’ It was my task to pick up Cordelia in my
arms and carry her offstage -- Scofield had carried her on. It wasn’t easy hoisting a dead-weight with
dignity off the floor of the stage. The
slippery leather costume didn’t help.
Sometimes her body sagged down to my knees. One night, when dumped in the wings by me,
Diana tartly remarked, ‘You’re not very strong, are you?’
King Lear was usually performed once a
week, on a Wednesday or Saturday, and each day included a matinee. This must have been a vocal and physical
strain for Scofield, having to play Lear twice a day, with all the stops
out. I imagine he was filming or
rehearsing something else in London,
as we hardly saw him, except on stage.
The
scheduling of the plays, and the actors, was quite complicated and must have
given the management a few headaches. For
instance, in the week beginning 1 October Macbeth preceded Measure for Measure,
which was followed by two performances on the Wednesday of King Lear and two of
The Dream on Thursday. Cymbeline was
played on the Friday and The Shrew twice on Saturday.
The seventh and last play in the season
was in complete contrast –The Comedy of Errors -- in which the minor leads were
given leading roles and the spear-carriers and extras Commedia dell’Arte
characters, like Harlequin, Pantalone, Colombina and Pulcinella. I was the Capitano. We all wore masks. Mine was a red-faced, choleric one, with
greasy black locks, whiskers and a long sharp nose. In a grey-black costume, with high-heeled
boots and a high floppy and feathered hat I had to stride about, posturing with
an epee. With boots and hat I must have
been about 6 feet 9 and looked like a giant rat. Whoever made the company’s boots did a grand
job, as they were made for specific individuals and were very comfortable. As Harlequin, Peter Geddis was given a
chance to show off his gymnastic skills.
The plot was all about mistaken
identities, which wasn’t difficult as there were two sets of identical twins,
played by Ian Richardson and Alec McCowen as the Antipholus twins, in similar
wigs and costumes, and Barry MacGregor and Ian Hewitson, ditto, as their
servants called Dromio. Diana Rigg’s
Adriana, all swooping voice and sweeping gestures, was married to the
Antipholus of Ian Richardson, and Susan Maryott was her sister. I’d never heard of Susan and no one heard of
her again, as she committed suicide a few months later.
Clifford Williams was the director. The action was played out on a double-decked
wooden raked stage on top of the theatre’s stage and it was great fun, for the
audience as well as us. The Comedy of
Errors opened in mid-October and the season ended at the beginning of December,
when The Comedy transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in London along with King Lear.
Michel Saint-Denis, who had directed The
Cherry Orchard for the RSC in London,
had been brought in to instruct the cast of The Comedy of Errors in the art of
acting with masks. Unfortunately, in
one of the lessons, when illustrating how a happy mask made you happy and a sad
one sad, he got them mixed up and acted sad for us when he was wearing a happy
mask.
He also got us to improvise a scene with
another actor, who in my case was Ian Cullen.
This was very difficult for me, to be acting without the protective and
liberating mask of costume, character, make-up and words. My self-conscious awkwardness and
embarrassment communicated itself to Ian and he cut short our scene, to our
mutual relief.
Towards the end of October it seemed for a
while that all our lives might be cut short because of the Cuban missile
crisis, which began on 14 October and climaxed two weeks later. I remember walking back to my digs in
Chestnut Walk after a few comfortless and doomy drinks in the Dirty Duck,
looking up at the sky and wondering if Russian missiles were already on their fateful
way. Accidentally meeting up with Alec
McCowen, I rather hoped that he would ask me back to his place as I didn’t want
to be alone when the missiles struck.
But he didn’t. I went to bed
thinking that I might never wake up.
But I did. The crisis was
resolved by the Russians removing their missiles from Cuba and the Americans removing theirs from Italy and Turkey. The international Tragedy of Errors was
never played.
It was in November that Ian McCulloch took
over from Patrick Allen as Posthumus in Cymbeline, which meant that I was now
his understudy. This increased my
anxiety about having to fill in for him if he had an accident, which he was
quite likely to do as he had a motor-bike.
He once gave me a lift from Oxford to Stratford on the back of
his bike. My knees stuck out and I felt
very unsafe, and when I eventually dismounted I could hardly walk.
As no new productions were being rehearsed
in November, the RSC management put the lesser lights to work on two in-house
productions, to give the minor leads and spears something to do and a chance to
showcase their talents. The plays were
performed in the rehearsal space at the back of the theatre. Clifford Williams directed the last four
scenes of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Michel Saint-Denis a one-act piece by
Brecht, The Exception and the Rule.
It was an odd experience and much more
fraught and less well done than what was happening nightly on the main
stage. In Faustus Nerys Hughes and Patricia Brake
were the Chorus, Michael Murray was Mephistophilis, Ian Richardson was an Old
Man, and Ian McCulloch was Faust’s servant, Wagner. Diana Rigg was a non-speaking Helen.
I was in the Brecht play as the Second
Assessor – John Corvin was the First Assessor.
I don’t recall anything about these productions. The cast-list tells me that the Coolie was
Peter Geddis, Brian Murray was the Second Policeman, and Maggie Drabble was the
Coolie’s Wife. The cast also included
Paul Hardwick and Clive Swift.
The two youngest ASMs, Elsa Bolam and
Nigel Noble, assisted in these productions, and it would be Nigel who assisted me
in finding accommodation when the Stratford
season ended in the first week of December and I returned to London.
Before the season ended all the actors
were seen by Peter Hall, who renewed or failed to renew individuals’ contracts
and discussed with the leading actors the planned productions and possible
parts they might play the following year, in London
as well as in Stratford. I was told that the company would like to
keep me on and that I would continue to appear in King Lear and The Comedy of
Errors, which were both going to be staged at the Aldwych Theatre in
December. I would also be in the casts
of any other London
productions planned for 1963. Once in London my wages would be
upped to £13 a week.
This was quite gratifying as it seemed
that I was accepted and acceptable as a professional actor and might continue
as such with the RSC. Despite missing
my cue in Cymbeline, I hadn’t let myself or the company down -- as two others
had done. One of them, Richard Barr,
playing in the Commedia dell’ Arte group, had playfully worn dark glasses at a
performance of The Comedy of Errors, and Bryan Reed had gone on stage once too
often after too many beers. In The
Dream his job as a lord was to place cushions on the stage for the lovers to
sit on while they watched the mechanicals’ play within the play. One night he threw them too vigorously onto
the stage and a couple of cushions skidded off the raked stage into the front
row of the stalls, where a man stood up and obligingly returned them.
The rest of us in 12a -- John Corvin,
Peter Geddis, Ian Hewitson, Ian Lindsay, Paul Greenhalgh and me – moved with
the company to London, and Bryan Reed’s place was take by Martin Jenkins, who
would become a drama producer with BBC Radio.
Because of him my dramatisation of Paradise Lost was broadcast on Radio
4 in November 1974 and then my dramatisation of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in
January 1976. This was later staged by
the Old Vic Theatre Company at the Old Vic in September 1980 as Lancelot and
Guinevere. The play was directed by
Martin, with Timothy West as Malory and Bryan Marshall (who’d been in 15 Medium
Regiment RA and became a friend) as Lancelot.
There would be changes in the RSC’s London company later on,
as other productions were added to the Aldwych repertoire. But the casts of King Lear and The Comedy of
Errors were transferred virtually intact.
In London, all the performances of King
Lear were sold out in a few days and there were queues for tickets extending from
the Box Office at the front of the theatre up Drury Lane and around past the
theatre’s Stage Door at the back. It
was exciting to realise and know from this, apart from reviews, that we were
appearing in the most highly regarded production of the last ten years.
This was also evident when Paul Scofield
made his first entrance from downstage right as Lear and was greeted by a
sustained burst of applause as he stalked, with his back to the audience, up to
his throne (positioned by John Corvin and myself). As he did so, he rather prissily said, for
the benefit of the rest of us, ‘Mmm.’
Then he turned and sat, instantly aged and kingly, before growling,
‘Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.’
As the stage area at the Aldwych was
smaller than that of the theatre at Stratford –
as were the wings – and as the newcomers had to be rehearsed, some run-throughs
were necessary before both productions were given their London openings in December. At the same time, from 9 December, we were
rehearsing the first of the RSC’s plays for 1963, The Physicists, by Friedrich
Dürrenmatt.
King Lear was given a week-long run, and
The Comedy of Errors played over the Christmas period, as the RSC’s holiday
entertainment. Lear was back at the
beginning of the year and then The Comedy of Errors was given six final
performances, on 3, 4 and 5 January (a Saturday), with matinees on each
day. As this crowded out any
concentrated rehearsals of The Physicists on those days, that play opened on
Wednesday, 9 January, with in effect three days of set, lighting and dress
rehearsals before that.
For the first time I had a part in a
modern play, as a Police Doctor, and I appeared twice, at the beginning of each
Act. I was part of a police team investigating the
deaths of nurses in a private sanatorium in Switzerland. Peter Brook was the director, and as with
Lear had extensive discussions with the leading actors, leaving those with
minor roles to work out their own characterisations and moves. After checking with him I grew a beard and
wore dark-rimmed glasses as the Police Doctor.
I also wore a dark suit and carried a medicine bag. I had about five lines to say in both Acts
in answer to questions from the Police Inspector, who was played by Clive
Swift. Ian McCulloch and Peter Geddis
were non-speaking uniformed policemen.
The second nurse to be strangled by Möbius (Cyril Cusack), was Diana
Rigg.
This happened at the end of Act One, and
as there was no front curtain, she lay on the stage, downstage left, for the
whole of the interval, until the lights came up on Act Two, when the police
team entered and I examined her before announcing that she’d been strangled
with the cord from a window curtain, which had been torn down by Möbius. All I did was kneel beside her, lift an
eyelid and examine her fingers. Why I
did the latter I have no idea, although I did ask a medical student I knew what
sort of cursory examination would be sufficient. More about that later.
The Physicists opened on Wednesday, 9
January 1963, at the start of the bitter weather of the Big Freeze that gripped
London for
three months. Its opening was preceded
on the 4th by an 11.30 am Reception for everyone in the cast given by the Swiss
Ambassador and his wife at the Embassy in Bryanston Square. Was Dürrenmatt there? I can’t remember. The play remained in the repertoire with
King Lear until the end of April. It
was another hit.
Felix Barker in the Evening News wrote in
his review, ‘This is the first new play of 1963 and a great one … (It is) one
of the most stimulating, dramatically powerful evenings I can recall. Also, in a rather grim way, one of the most
amusing.’ The Times review called the
play ‘The blackest black comedy yet to appear in this country … The main
performances are in a manner of brilliant ambiguity – notably Michael Hordern’s
mock-Newton, wig at a drunken angle and alternating between icily rational
courtesy and nervous frenzy. Cyril
Cusack, making a welcome return to London
after many years, gives a nobly subdued account of Möbius. But Irene Worth as the doctor is the triumph
of the production. She shrinks into the
part of the hunchback, creating a whole range of gestures appropriate to
physical disability and which develops from expressing the authority of reason
to the tyranny of madness.’ Alan Webb
masquerading as Einstein was the other atomic physicist bent on abducting
Möbius, who had ‘discovered the most profound secret of the universe and has
entered the madhouse to save the world from becoming one.’
I was Michael Hordern’s understudy, and
although I had a go at learning his part, I was far from being
word-perfect. As there weren’t any
understudy rehearsals that I recall, I always checked at the Stage Door that
Michael Hordern had arrived before running up the stairs to the second-floor
dressing-room I now shared for a time with Ian McCulloch, Peter Geddis, John
Corvin, Ian Lindsay, Paul Greenhalgh and two others. We had
a dresser, a nice young man called Roger Gale, from Poole in Dorset,
who would work for Radio Caroline, Radio London and Radio 4 before becoming a
Conservative MP.
There
were minor cast changes when some of the company returned to Stratford at the beginning of March for the
start of the new season there, and newcomers took the place of Lear’s departing
knights. The cosy socialising and
family feeling of the company dissipated and faded away. Our homes were also widely scattered about London now, with our own
friends at hand, and we only met up in the tiny Green Room behind the Stage
Door or in the Opera Tavern opposite the Theatre Royal after the show. The leading actors were never seen in the
Green Room, where Maggie Roy attended to our need for cups of tea and coffee
and poached eggs on toast. The stars sent their dressers down to fetch
whatever they might want and after the show consorted with visiting friends or
went straight home.
I was now aged 26 and living in a town
house on the fringes of Belgravia, at 32 Eccleston Street,
SW1. I was sharing a bedroom on the
second-floor front with Nigel Noble, who had also transferred to London, as an ASM. I think he had some family or other
connection with the landlady, Mrs Fradgley, who owned the high four-storey
house, plus basement, in which a cousin of hers, plus daughter, lived. Mrs Fradgley, a short, middle-aged dumpy
woman who wore glasses, was a widow and had worked in the Foreign Office,
allegedly for MI5. She rented two
bedrooms in the house to young persons, generally foreign students. She cooked breakfast for us in the
ground-floor kitchen at the back and also provided us with Sunday lunch,
usually a roast, in the ground floor dining-room at the front. Above this was the sitting-room, where we
were free to share in whatever TV programmes she was watching on a small black
and white TV. She hardly ever missed
the TV News. For all this I paid her a
very modest £3 a week.
I lived there for well over a year and my
rent wasn’t increased when Nigel returned to Stratford in the spring and I moved into a
single bedroom at the back. Our former
bedroom was taken over by two French girls.
I was very lucky to be there, to be living so cheaply in comparative
comfort in central London. Buses in Buckingham Palace Road took me into the
city, and the nearby Victoria Station, apart from the Undergound, was also
serviced by a bus terminus. If I had
wanted to, I could have walked to work via Whitehall,
Trafalgar Square
and thence along the Strand to the
Aldwych. I was not to know that two other
buildings in the Aldwych would soon have a special significance in my life.
The last performances of King Lear in London, including a
matinee, were on Saturday, 20 April.
The following week The Dream was rehearsed
over three days while the newcomers among the fairies and Theseus’ attendants
and huntsmen were woven into the production.
This included me, now posing as an attendant lord in a splendid cream
and gold Elizabethan costume, complete with ruff and thigh-length boots and a
wavy-haired brown wig. With me as
Theseus’ attendants were April Walker and John Cobner. April was tall and blonde, full of fun and everyone’s
friend. We three had little to do,
providing a decorative background in Act I Scene1 and again in Act V Scene 1
when we sat on a chest and were amused by the mechanicals’ play. The leading actors were the same as in Stratford, except that
Titania was now played by Juliet Mills, not Judi Dench. Ian Richardson was Oberon, as before, and
Brian Murray, Diana Rigg, Paul Hardwick and Ian Hewitson again played Lysander,
Helena, Bottom
and Flute. Ian Holm continued as Puck, until he was
replaced by Michael Williams.
The Dream was being revived as it was to
go on tour, with The Physicists, to four cities from 12 May. Before that the RSC had been invited to Paris to participate in
the 10th Thèatre des Nations and present King Lear for seven
performances at the Comédie Française.
So it was that the company entrained for Paris at the end of April, and after crossing
the Channel by ferry, arrived in the French capital, where we were lodged in
various hotels according to our status in the company.
Unfortunately, I remember very little of
our nine days in Paris. Peter Brook’s production received standing
ovations and rave reviews. The whole
company was invited by the British Ambassador ‘for Drinks’ at the Embassy on 3
May at noon, and Paul Scofield, Irene Worth and the other leading actors were
entertained by their French counterparts, like Jean-Louis Barrault and his
wife, Madeleine Renaud. The Embassy
wrote later to the British Council to say, ‘The British theatre has scored a
triumph of a kind of which the French are normally unwilling to think any other
country capable – a triumph of uncompromising intellectual integrity and of
sheer professionalism.’
I couldn’t help thinking of my previous
stage appearances in France
with the OUDS productions of Measure for Measure and Richard II in 1960 and
1961. They seemed a long time ago. But within two years, I was appearing with a
superlative RSC cast in a production that was being hailed as one of the best
for many years. It was unbelievable,
but true.
Another event, however, made more of an
impression on me at the time than being on the stage of the Comédie
Française. This was the preview of a
film, directed by Peter Brook. It was
given a special showing, in a preview cinema, to which the company was
invited. He had been working off and on
since 1961 on the film, which was shot on an island off Puerto
Rico. It was about to be
screened at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was given an X certificate. I had never heard of the book on which the
film was based, nor of its author, William Golding. And now, before us, was Brook’s grimly
realistic, black and white version of Lord of the Flies. Penelope Gilliatt called it ‘an implacably
pessimistic fable.’ And so it was.
After the showing, Brook talked about the
difficulties he had had in getting it made, about the locations and the boys in
the cast, one of whom, James Aubrey, who played Ralph, was at the
screening. 60 hours of footage had been
shot and it took a year to edit the film.
Brook was gratuitously rude about his assistant director, Toby
Robertson, ex-Cambridge, who played the rescuing naval officer and was
allegedly aroused by semi-naked Ralph crawling towards him at the end of the
film. As a theatre director Brook could
be quite nasty. At the Aldwych dress
rehearsal of King Lear, he had sat in the middle of the stalls, and during the
reconciliation scene between Lear and Cordelia, he had yelled at her from the
stalls, shouting, ‘Louder, Diana! … I can’t hear you! … Louder!
We returned to London on 10 May. Two days later, on Sunday, 12 May, we
assembled at 2.0 pm at King’s Cross Station and set out for Edinburgh, the
first of the northern cities to see the RSC productions of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream and The Physicists. As we hadn’t
performed the plays since the last week of April, there were run-throughs of
both plays on the stage of the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, on the Monday and Tuesday mornings. We opened on Tuesday night with The Dream.
My mother saw both plays, and it must have
been most rewarding for her to see her son on the stage, with such a starry
company and fully employed. I expect my
sister only saw The Dream, in which she had starred as Theseus in Karachi long ago. It was marvellous and almost incredible that
I was now performing in a theatre where I had sat in the Upper Circle on so many occasions, gazing
in wonder down at the stage on which I now stood. Now, during the Curtain Call, I could gaze
wonderingly at the audience as I took a bow with the rest of the cast.
The Evening News printed a piece in its
gossip column about the three RSC actors who had Edinburgh associations. It said that Donald Layne-Smith, Philostrate
in The Dream, had been acting for 30 years and that after the war he had been a
member of the Wilson Barrett Company.
Ian Richardson was said to be 29, to have been born in Edinburgh and to have studied at the Glasgow
College of Dramatic Art. I was revealed
to have appeared on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe a few years ago and to have
been a former pupil at the Edinburgh Academy, as well as an Oxford undergraduate.
From Edinburgh
the company travelled to Newcastle,
where we performed at the Theatre Royal.
Then it was on to the Alhambra at Bradford and finally to the Manchester Opera House. The Dream opened in London again on 13 June, after a run-through
the day before. It ran for 62
performances until 18 September.
The last performance of The Physicists was
on Friday, 5 July. Some time before
that Diana played a joke on me – on stage.
At the beginning of Act 2, I knelt as usual downstage left beside her
body, which lay on its back enveloped in the curtain, and followed my usual
procedure of examining her eyes and the clenched fingers of her left hand. This time her fingers were rigid and
resisted being prised open. Suddenly
she relaxed and opened them, and before my eyes there appeared in her hand a very
burnt black sausage – at the very moment that Clive Swift turned to me and
inquired about the nurse’s cause of death.
I had to pause before I answered while the corpse below me shook with
mirth. She was still convulsed when
attendants picked her up, put her on a trolley and wheeled her away.
Somewhere in the radio archives of the BBC
is a recording of the RSC production of The Physicists, which was rehearsed at
the BBC between 15-17 August 1963 and recorded on the 18th, a
Sunday. It was broadcast on Radio 3 on
17 October and again in March 1972.
Nothing about this survives in my memory. The existence of this broadcast only lives
in a BBC contract dated December 1971, which states that I will be paid about
£15 for agreeing that the BBC may have broadcast rights for a further three
years. Having already broadcast with
Radio Hong Kong and the Scottish Home Service, I was probably a bit blasé about
all this, even about entering the grand portals of Broadcasting House in Portland Place.
Back in July 1963 there was some
excitement, however, as The Dream had been chosen as an appropriate
entertainment (being set in and near Athens)
for a Royal Gala performance on Wednesday, 10 July, in honour of the State
Visit of the King and Queen of the Hellenes.
In the Dress Circle audience that night,
apart from the Greek royals, were the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Princess
Royal, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, not to
mention dignitaries like Lord and Lady Avon (formerly Sir Anthony Eden and his
wife). He had resigned early in 1957
after the debacle of the Suez Crisis and had been replaced by Harold
Macmillan. Two years later King
Constantine of Greece,
the son of King Paul and Queen Frederika, would be deposed.
From the stage we could see the glitter of
the tiaras and jewels that the women in the Dress Circle wore. The cast weren’t presented to the Queen on
the stage after the performance, although some of the leading actors were
invited to meet the royals in the area of the Dress Circle bar, which had been
profusely adorned with greenery and flowers.
Earlier that week there had been
run-throughs of the next RSC production, The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Peter
Wood. The dress rehearsals took place
on 14 and 15 July and John Gay’s comedy, with music and songs, opened on 16
July. It ran in tandem with The Dream
until the middle of September, both plays being deemed suitable material for
the summer holidays.
The company had been subjected to
auditions back in February to determine whether we could sing. Everyone had to sing in the show, either in
the chorus or as individuals. I expect
I subjected the Music Director, David Taylor, and Raymond Leppard, who did new
arrangements of the songs, to the Sentry’s Song from Iolanthe. I was given a part that had a name, Harry
Paddington, but no dialogue.
Nonetheless I sang and danced as one of the prisoners, and had a wacky,
stained and shredded costume, topped by a collapsing dirty grey wig. In one of the dances I was partnered by a
tiny newcomer, Denise Coffey, and our mismatched and clumsy exertions,
downstage right, extracted some laughs from the audience. It was a very enjoyable show, with about
eight newcomers, who included some professional singers, as well as several
musicians, one of whom was Martin Best, father of the puking baby. Later
on he acquired a queer cat, a black and white tom. It was very possessive and used to hiss at and
menace any male person who went near Martin.
The imaginative and moody set, designed by
Sean Kenny, was cleverly transformed from a gloomy prison into a sailing-ship
at the end. He had designed the huge
and elaborate sets for Lionel Bart’s Blitz! which had opened in May at the
Adelphi Theatre the previous year. I
had seen the show and had been astounded, like many, by Kenny’s depictions of
Victoria Station, Petticoat Lane,
the London Undergound and the bombing of London
during the Blitz.
The RSC’s newest production was once again
well received. The unnamed Dramatic
Critic of The Times wrote, ‘The curtain rises on a sombre prison interior ...
In the background rises the mast of a transportation ship, a gallows tree
stands before the gates, and the prisoners lie huddled among a collection of
giant packing cases, scrutinised by a guard patrolling an upper gallery. Flung into this dungeon the actors begin
their play, using the packing cases as scenic properties and breaking off
performance when the sentry passes: thus they play out the story of Macheath as
a transient moment of gaiety, its happy ending swiftly followed by the return
of harsh reality when they and their spectators are driven aboard by
gunpoint. In a final tableau the set
closes in on itself forming the ship’s poop with the ironic name “The Good
Hope” just visible in the darkening atmosphere … Derek Godfrey’s Macheath, a
lanky, raffish gallant with the sardonic manner of an underworld Byron, gets
his best effects from ironic understatement … Dorothy Tutin plays Polly in her
pert crafty manner, which is more than a match for Virginia McKenna’s openly
scheming Lucy. Ronald Radd and Tony
Church make the negotiations between Peachum and Lockit fittingly reptilian …
(There is) a brilliant miniature performance by Patience Collier as a raddled
bawd … The old melodies of “Over the hills and far away” and “Lillibulero” soar
away in the voices (and) there are moments of altogether unlooked for beauty,
such as the final trio.’
Patience Collier was an excellent actress
and an interesting woman. Of Jewish
origins, like Irene Worth (and Claire Bloom) she was 53 in 1963. She was reputed to wear a wig and have a wooden
leg, and indeed she walked with something of a waddle. She had played Cymbeline’s wicked queen and
Regan in Lear. John Cobner, who took
over from James Booth as Edmund and was half her age, said that when she kissed
him she stuck her tongue down his throat.
Married to an eminent biologist, she had three children, but seemed to
have a liking for young men, like a 22-year-old actor called Gary Bond, who
used to visit her at Stratford. He went on to star in several West End musicals and died of AIDS in 1995, a month after
Jeremy Brett, who had been his companion during most of the 1970s.
There were other cast changes. Patricia
Connolly took over from Diana in The Physicists as the second nurse and was the
chief Fairy in The Dream as well as a tart in The Beggar’s Opera. Elizabeth Spriggs was also in the latter
and would become a stalwart of the RSC as well as one of the finest character
actresses of stage and film. Years later
I was delighted when I heard that both she and Patrick Allen would play the
mother and father in my third TV play, The Thirteenth Day of Christmas, which
was transmitted by Granada TV in their series, ‘Time For Murder’, in December
1985.
Away from the theatre I saw less of the
company and more of my own friends during 1963, those from the Academy or Oxford who were now living and working in London.
At the same time I started contacting casting agents again, like Miriam
Brickman, Maurice Lambert, and Pauline Melville at the Royal Court, and I studied the ads that
appeared in The Stage for forthcoming film and stage productions. Now that I was an established actor, I began
to think I might do better if I left the RSC.
I auditioned for I don’t know what at the
Saville Theatre in February, for something else at the Phoenix Theatre in
April, and also at the makeshift offices of the National Theatre in July. I tried to find an agent and approached MCA
and the Christopher Mann agency and for a time Kenneth Ewing at Fraser and Dunlop
took me on. At auditions I was
generally deemed to be too tall, or not what they were looking for. Undeterred, I had photos taken of me by Mark
Gudgeon of Edmark, who had taken most of the posed photos for the OUDS and ETC
productions. One duly appeared in
Spotlight. For the Edmark session, at Oxford, I wore a shaggy
top and sported my Physicists beard. I
also paid for a toupee to be fashioned to conceal my thinning hair. But this made me so self-conscious, and the
mechanics of attaching it to my head so bothersome, that I stowed it away in
its box and only brought it out at parties when drink had made me bold and I
felt like fooling about.
My pocket London diary for 1963 records the dismal fact
that I visited a dentist ten times that year.
Mr Wilkinson, a short and grey-haired Australian, who practised his
dental skills on me at 13 Pembridge
Gardens, Notting Hill
Gate, had been recommended by Diana Rigg; she lived nearby. The diary also records that fact that I saw
the opulent Burton and Taylor film, Cleopatra, on 1 August at 2
pm. It had premiered in New York in June.
This reminds me that I was in a packed
Opera Tavern one night – it must have been after one of the RSC opening nights,
probably that of The Physicists in January (Burton was friends with Michael
Hordern and Cyril Cusack) -- and had to push my way through the crowd after
visiting the bar to order two pints of beer.
‘Do you know who that was?’ asked a beer-guzzling chum. I looked around and saw that I had pushed my
way between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor -- without noticing who they
were. Neither of them was very tall (she
was 5 feet 4) and I was trying not to spill my pints. ‘She looks a million dollars,’ I said admiringly
– which she had been paid for playing Cleopatra. She was of course worth much more. They were staying at the Dorchester Hotel in
Park Lane,
in separate suites, while Burton commuted
between the Dorchester and his wife’s temporary
home in Hampstead. They had begun filming
The VIPs in January at Elstree Studios, and when work on that ended, Burton went on to film
Becket at Pinewood, with Peter O’Toole as Henry II.
It was then or a year or so later that I
called on them when both Burton and Taylor were staying at the Dorchester,
hoping to interest them in taking part in a staged reading, as Adam and Eve, of
my dramatisation of Paradise Lost. Burton was enamoured with Oxford
– he had briefly been a student at Exeter
College in 1944 while
training for the RAF and had been tutored by Neville Coghill. I wasn’t invited up to the Burton/Taylor
suites, and having handed over a script of my play to a female minion in the
lobby, heard nothing more. How
different evrtyhing would have been if they had said “Yes.”
I wasn’t backward in coming forward, as an
actor and a writer, and if one of the many doors I knocked on had opened, how
different things might have been.
In
June I boldly sent copies of the scripts of Paradise Lost and The Miracles to
Peter Hall, suggesting that the RSC might like to consider one or both as
productions at the Aldwych. He replied that he thought the verse of
Paradise Lost was ‘too stately, weighty and convoluted for speaking’ and that
the verse of The Miracles was ‘more dramatically interesting,’ although it
retained ‘a punchy medieval beat which gets a bit monotonous.’ He was wrong on both counts. He ended, ‘I’m sorry not to elaborate
further, but quite honestly I’m not supposed to be dictating letters at all
until the end of the Histories. Yours
ever, Peter.’
In November I sent a copy of The Miracles
to Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre. His secretary replied that he was too busy
to attend a performance of the play, which was staged in December, but that
Kenneth Tynan would like to see it. Olivier was very busy – the National Theatre’s
first season of plays, which culminated with Olivier’s Othello, had begun at
the Old Vic with Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet on 22 October. Eventually six different plays were being
staged over three days, the programme changing between matinee and evening
performances.
Eric Porter, at my request – he was now
living in Islington -- sent a letter to the Arts Council of Great Britain,
acting as my sponsor for one of the bursaries they awarded to promising playwrights. After I had sent them all the material and
information they required and was interviewed, I didn’t get anything. Nor did anything result from a letter to
Ronald Eyre at the BBC, nor from an audition at the National Theatre – ‘I am
afraid there are no lines of parts that would be suitable for you.’
Agents and others in the business were
generally kindly. The casting director
at ABPC, GB Walker, wrote to say. ‘Should there be any way of using you later
on, I will certainly get in touch with you.’
Julia Smith, director of Dr Finlay’s Casebook, wrote, ‘We don’t have
many parts in your sort of age group … But should anything vaguely suitable
crop up I will contact you.’ Although
Miriam Brickman, of Vic Films, was unable to see The Miracles, she wrote later
that she had heard ‘very good things about it.’ John Neville’s secretary wrote from
Nottingham Playhouse that although their programme was completely full, ‘If you
would care to send Mr Neville a copy of The Miracles later, we might fit it in,
perhaps the following Easter – I know he would be interested to read it.’ And she added, ‘We will not forget you if a
suitable part turns up.’ In December I
also wrote to other theatre directors with Univ and Oxford connections, like Patrick Dromgoole,
Colin George and Peter Dews.
Then in October 1963 a door on which I
hadn’t knocked opened slightly, and a publisher, Methuen, wrote to say that they were
interested in reading The Miracles. I
wasn’t that interested in them, as by then I was heavily involved in an actual
production of the play, my third, in a London
church. But more about that later.
The
last play to be produced at the Aldwych Theatre that year, and my last with the
RSC, was The Representative, by Rolf Hochhuth.
Directed by Clifford Williams, it
opened on Wednesday, 25 September and alternated with The Beggar’s Opera until
29 October, after which it was joined by The Hollow Crown, John Barton’s
entertainment about English kings and queens, mainly featuring Max Adrian, Paul
Hardwick, Tony Church and Dorothy Tutin.
The Representative was controversial, as
it presented Pope Pius XII during WW2 as being more concerned with the Vatican’s
business interests and financial assets than with Hitler’s slaughter of the
Jews, also with the fact that he wasn’t openly opposed to this and hadn’t
condemned it. Originally over five
hours long, it was cut down to six scenes.
In the second scene of Act 2, a throne-room in the Vatican, I was
a Swiss Guard who opened the door to the room for the entrance of the Pope and
closed it behind him. The elaborate
costume I wore was colourful and included a breastplate and helmet; I was also
armed with a long halberd. But I would
only have been glimpsed by most of the audience and not seen at all by
some.
The Pope and I stood outside the set in
the gloom at the back of the stage until I heard the cue for me to open the
door, whereupon Alan Webb, as the Pope, swept past me. He was replaced by Eric Porter in
November. Alec McCowen played the young
priest who confronted the Pope and donned the yellow star of the Jews
imprisoned at Auschwitz, where the Commandant,
called the Doctor, was icily played by Ian Richardson. So powerful was the last scene set in Auschwitz that after what had gone before, when the
curtain fell, audiences sat in their seats, silent and overwhelmed. There was no applause. Nor was there a curtain call. It was extraordinary.
Extraordinary in a different way was the
appearance of ‘Members of the Royal Shakespeare Company’ in Wormwood Scrubs
Prison on 20 October. How and why this
originated I now have no idea. But the
minor leads in the company, as well as the spear carriers, etc, weren’t much
used in the Aldwych season that year, and 16 of us got together to present
Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple in the prison on a Sunday afternoon. It was an odd choice, as the play is very
wordy and ends with a trial and a hanging (which doesn’t take place). Directed by Ian Lindsay, it was rehearsed
in three weeks, with John Cobner and April Walker in leading roles. I played Lawyer Hawkins, who only appears in
Act One in connection with the reading of a will.
What was extraordinary was that the three
prisoners, trustees, who assisted us backstage with the set and lighting were
all, as the Assistant Governor informed us afterwards, convicted murderers. One had killed his wife. Another was Emmett Dunne, once a Sergeant
Major with the REME in Germany,
who in 1953 had killed Sgt Walters, husband of his lover, and staged his demise
so that it looked like suicide. Emmett
Dunne was sentenced to death in 1955, but as there was no capital punishment in
Germany,
he got life. In the event he was
released in 1965, two years after I met him.
Emmett Dunne sat and chatted with us after
the show and over cups of tea claimed to be innocent of the other man’s
murder. In fact his defence had been
that he acted in self-defence, giving the other Sergeant a karate chop to the
neck. The prosecution said Sgt Walters
had been strangled. I was impressed by
Emmett Dunne’s placid and pleasant demeanour.
He had baby-blue eyes, seemed innocent and his story was believable. My interest in murder, and the books I wrote
about murders and murderers, was much influenced by that meeting in Wormwood
Scrubs.
The all-male audience, all dressed in dark
blue battle-dress clothing, attended by guards who stood at the back of the
lecture hall, were attentive and appreciative.
With no financial, work or family worries in prison, and with their
general well-being, routines and meals being taken care of by others, they
seemed cheerful and relaxed. When we
left, Emmett Dunne walked with us to the prison’s main gate, as any good host
would do, and said goodbye. I was never
so aware of a sense of freedom as the gate dividing him from us closed behind
us and shut him inside.
Gareth Morgan, who had joined the RSC in
June RSC, played a small part in The Devil’s Disciple, as he had in The
Representative and The Beggar’s Opera.
Of the original occupants of 12a in Stratford
only Ian Lindsay and I were still together, the others having left or returned
to Stratford,
like Peter Geddis and John Corvin. None
would graduate to major roles, playing occasional minor ones, as did Peter
Geddis, who appeared consistently over the years in several TV series. I saw Paul Greenhalgh in Edward VII and Ian
Lindsay regularly appeared as George in Men Behaving Badly.
During rehearsals for The Devil’s Disciple
and in the Green Room at the Aldwych Theatre I must have told Gareth, a short, softly
spoken Welshman, about The Miracles and its success at Oxford and Edinburgh,
and after a few discussions over the next few months with the company and the
management, it was decided that ‘Members of the Royal Shakespeare Company
(London)’ would present The Miracles on three Sundays in November and
December.
Preparations must have begun in August, if
not before. For on Sunday, 8 September there was a
meeting that probably included a read-through of the play. Gareth directed the play and I was its
producer. I also advised him on how
scenes had been staged in Oxford and I chose the
costumes, which meant visiting the Hire Department of the RSC in Stratford more than once
in September and rummaging through the many racks of colourfully evocative
costumes from previous RSC productions.
As at Oxford
I also designed the programme, in lieu of tickets, and supervised its
printing. The set was built in the RSC workshops at Stratford to Gareth’s
design and the lighting designed by Stuart Anderson, a young friend of Peter
Wood. The music and songs for the
production were specially composed and arranged by the RSC’s Music Director,
Brian Priestman. Everyone worked for
free, and I think that Peter Hall, who had been considering an adaptation of
the mystery plays by John Barton, agreed to this production to see whether it
would succeed. I still hoped of course
that my version would be staged by the RSC, and if it had … Who knows what
might have followed?
All those who took part were approached
individually and co-operated whole-heartedly.
There was a good deal of doubling – I played four parts, 2 Detractor, 2
Pharisee, Poor Man and 1 Torturer – and the crowd, made up from the RSC’s
backstage and admin staffers, was boosted by four male students from Gareth’s
drama school, the Rose Bruford College.
Peter Jeffrey played Jesus, Paul Hardwick Joseph, Ian Richardson Herod,
Michael Williams Judas, John Nettleton Caiaphas, and Tony Church Pilate. Martin Best was the 3 Shepherd and the 3 Jew
and also played some medieval music.
Denise Coffey was Mary, Diana Rigg Mary of Bethany, and Elizabeth Spriggs Mary
Magdalene.
St George’s Church in Notting Hill Gate and
Southwark Cathedral were for unremembered reasons chosen for the three Sunday
performances. And I don’t recall where
and when we rehearsed during September, October and into November. I believe, however, that St George’s was one of the churches I looked
at when looking for a venue for The Miracles back in March 1962.
The pressures of this production
overwhelmed Gareth one day and he broke down in a car that was being driven by
Peter Jeffrey near Park Lane. Peter stopped the car, and while I tried to
reassure Gareth, Peter entered a hotel and returned with a glass of
brandy. Gareth downed it and slowly
recovered. Although I doubted whether
the production would be as good as the Oxford
production of The Miracles, I wrote to Olivier and several theatre agents, like
Christopher Mann and Plunket Greene, inviting them to see the show, and
me. But once again, when the play began
at 8.0 pm on Sunday, 17 November and the Angel appeared to Mary in St George’s Church, Notting Hill, the raw power of
the mystery plays exerted their magic anew.
The reviewer of the Illustrated London
News said, ‘It was uncanny to come from a miserable drenching night to the
crowded church and to the splendour of a play sequence that Gordon Honeycombe
has made from five of the old mystery cycles … Fifty players of the Royal
Shakespeare Company have joined in the production. I knew from the moment that the Angel of the
Annunciation appeared on the upper level of the platform stage in St George’s that it would
be a night for memory. So it
proved. There was no wavering, no
fumbling, always a vigorous direct attack.
The plays were reborn in the voices of Peter Jeffrey, a Jesus of intense
compassion; Ian Richardson, whose Herod took the stage in youth like a Marlovian
tyrant, and in age like a haunted man; Elizabeth Spriggs, in the adoration and
sorrow of Magdalene; Tony Church as Pilate, and a whole company of others. The Crucifixion of Christ by the tormentors
on Calvary had an unsparing medieval
starkness, the Resurrection an extraordinary sense of daybreak.’
JC Trewin reviewed the production for the
Birmingham Post. He wrote of ‘the
splendid simplicity’ of The Miracles, which was ‘acted in a method
extraordinarily clear and moving.’ He said, ‘Certain entrances and exits were
made down the nave. Here the citizens of Jerusalem came with their cries of “Hosanna!”
on Palm Sunday. Here the Torturers led Christ towards Calvary. The
medieval verse could illuminate the mind as if it had been flashed into life by
flint and timber … One will remember such moments as the adoration of the Three
Kings; Herod’s rush through the church on a hobby-horse; the terror of the
Towneley play of the Crucifixion; and the closing beauty of the Resurrection,
when the glow upon the risen Christ died into the shadows: the platform was
suddenly bare, the church lights flowered, and the doors opened on the November
mists of Campden Hill.’ As with The
Representative, there was no curtain call at the end and no applause.
Five days later, on 22 November, President
Kennedy was assassinated.
Perhaps partly on account of this, the
production was less effective on 24 November and again on 1 December in the
shadowy vastness of Southwark Cathedral, where the poor acoustics didn’t help But it was nonetheless deemed by those who
were in the audience to be something of a success. Among them were Peter Wood, Kenneth Tynan
and Rudolf Nureyev, who had just triumphed in La Bayadère with the Royal
Ballet. I didn’t meet them and was in
any event preoccupied on the final night with the dismantling of the lighting
and the set and other aspects of the production. I was also saying my goodbyes.
The day before this, the matinee and
evening performance of The Representative on Saturday, 30 November, had been my
last with the RSC in the Aldwych Theatre, and the Sunday performance of The
Miracles was my very last and long goodbye.
I had decided to leave the company and had resigned.
This decision was largely prompted by my
lack of advancement in the company, apart from the lines I had as the Police
Doctor, by the little I had to do on stage and off, by the vapidity of my
five-second, half-seen appearance as a Swiss Guard, and by rumours that the
company would be touring nine East European cities in 1964 and would then go to
America. I thought it must be possible
to find other work as an actor in London. The four-week tour of Britain in May
had been unsettling, as we’d had to move on every week. That tour had seemed to me to be a hiatus, a
waste of time as far as I was concerned.
If I stayed with the RSC and went on tour again, I would still be
saying, ‘Edmund is dead, my lord,’ moving stage furniture off and on for a year
or so, and as a soldier, servant or lord just filling a large gap in the
stage. I was impatient for more, and
time was passing. I was 27 that
September. Besides, I still thought of myself as a
writer, not as an actor. Acting was not much more than a paid and most
enjoyable hobby.
Nonetheless I wrote to some theatre
companies like that at Nottingham Playhouse, where the directors were Frank Dunlop,
John Neville and Peter Ustinov. I
received a pleasant letter in reply from Neville’s secretary, saying, ‘I am
afraid that the Company is complete for the coming Season, but I know that Mr
Neville will remember you if anything suitable should turn up in the
future.’ I also wrote to Bryan
Stonehouse, and to Ronald Eyre, who had been a student of Peter Bayley. Both Stonehouse and Eyre were at the BBC’s
Television Centre at Wood Lane,
W12. Neither offered me any employment.
When on a visit to Bournemouth
I told AD about my decision to leave the RSC she was ‘surprised and slightly
alarmed.’ She wrote in her Memories, ‘I
felt extremely anxious about Gordon’s financial position, should he leave the
RSC before securing some alternative employment. He,
however, was not in the least concerned, and I was told not to worry about him
or his future: he was quite capable of looking after himself and confident that
success would come in good time.’
My mother also took this view. I had seen very little of her in 1963, apart
from the RSC’s week in Edinburgh. My sister informed me that our mother had
had a mastectomy. Her left arm was now
terribly swollen and enclosed by a stocking bandage, which she concealed by the
cardigan she always wore now. She was
still living in rented rooms in Mrs McCallan’s house at 4 Craiglockhart Road, and had lost her
liveliness. She wore less make-up and looked drawn and
tired, but she still tried to look her best when she went out.
If I had stayed with the RSC I might in
time have graduated to minor leads and bigger parts and might, years later,
have become a character actor like Michael Hordern. Who knows?
I had understudied him and, as I had done, he had coincidentally played
Paul Southman in Saint’s Day in 1951 and Morgenhall in The Dock Brief. He
had even been in the film version of The Bed-Sitting Room. But I had made my decision and once more,
boldly and hopefully, faced the Great Unknown.
Unknown to me, other people had also made
a fateful decision, and the day before I flew off to Jersey
to make contact with the Honeycombes who lived there and find out whether we
were related, I got to hear what that was.
The day after that last Sunday performance
of The Miracles at Southwark -- the day after my very last day with the RSC -- a
Priority telegram was delivered to 32
Eccleston Street on the morning of Monday, 2
December 1963.
It said, ‘WOULD LIKE TO PUBLISH MIRACLES
STOP CAN WE DISCUSS BEFORE YOU LEAVE = CULLEN METHUEN.’
13. LONDON,
1963-64
Back in October, on the 10th, I
had received a letter from an editor at Methuen,
Geoffrey Strachan, addressed to me at the Aldwych Theatre. It said, ‘We would be interested to
re-consider your version of various medieval plays under the title of The
Miracles.’ He asked me to send him a
copy of the play. This letter from
Strachan arose out of a telephone conversation I’d had with a Miss
Lonsdale-Cooper the previous week. I
have no idea when or why I phoned her or whether she phoned me. I probably
approached Methuen,
who published plays, in view of the play’s forthcoming production by the
RSC.
John Cullen was one of Methuen’s
directors, and when I phoned him straightaway on 2 December in reply to his
telegram, he said that Methuen
wanted to publish the play. It was
unbelievable – as one door closed, another had unexpectedly and suddenly opened. I felt quite emotional – someone believed
that something I had written was good enough to publish. I had now been accepted as a writer as well
as an actor.
Much heartened, I flew over to Jersey from
Southampton and began researching the
Honeycombes who had lived there since the 1820s, and with the help of the local
genealogical society I read through parish and other records, noting down
anything concerning a Honeycombe. I met
most of those who were living there now, including Roy and Evelyn, whose
marriage in Edinburgh
in 1955 had fired my dormant interest in the Honeycombes. I had already begun the process of piecing
together the various Cornish family trees.
Now in Jersey I began interviewing and tape-recording the older
Honeycombes there, aware now of the missed opportunities I had had of recording
the memories of Great-Aunt Emma, who had died, aged 100.8, in an old folks’
home in Dartford, Kent, in July 1963.
I followed the Jersey visit up with
several sessions in the Genealogical Society in London,
where I read through printed parish registers covering Cornwall and any other books that might
contain the names of Honeycombes. Any
reference I duly noted down -- and slowly, over the years, I began to piece it
all together. The greatest thrill was
seeing, and holding, ancient documents, like parish registers and hand-written
wills drawn up in Cornish villages long ago and signed, sometimes with an X or
an H, by an ailing, illiterate Honeycombe.
The most marvellous were the Assession Rolls and Court Rolls for the
Manor of Calstock which I was allowed to peruse at the Duchy of Cornwall
offices in London, parchments written by medieval hands, in Latin, and dating
from as far back as 1327.
In Jersey,
Sam and Dot Honeycombe were particularly welcoming. They had two sons, John and Richard, and
whenever I returned to Jersey after that visit
I stayed with the family in St Clements.
At the time of my first visit John was 17½. In his Memoirs, he wrote, ‘Gordon Honeycombe
came to the island for the first time in 1963.
He was very tall, much taller than the other Honeycombes, and was very
well educated and bred. He had been acting
with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was now out of work and living in London … He told us we were all descended from Honeycombes
who had lived in Cornwall for centuries … There
was even a Honeycombe House in Cornwall,
at Calstock. He was interviewed about
this by Channel TV.’
That appearance on Channel TV was the
first time I was seen on television.
The lights, the cueing, the live broadcast reminded me of my times with
the Scottish Home Service and the RSC.
I felt quite at home.
A week after I returned to London and to Eccleston Street a
draft contract covering the publication of The Miracles arrived in the
post. As an author I was calling myself
John Honicombe at that time because the numerological letter count was more
beneficial than that of Gordon Honeycombe.
Would everything have been different if I had stuck to John Honicombe I
wonder? Methuen agreed to pay me 7½ per cent of the
purchase price of the play and give me an advance of £75.
I signed the contract over-eagerly and
without much thought, for I signed away certain film, radio and TV rights which
I was entitled to keep to myself. So a
top-class play agent, Margaret (Peggy) Ramsay, told me in January when I tried
to interest her in The Miracles and in the synopsis of a play about the
survivors of a nuclear war, called A Rainy Day in August. Methuen,
she said, would take a much higher cut from selling those rights than a
professional agent, who would charge 10%.
I was more careful about signing any contract after that.
Peggy Ramsay’s agency was in Goodwin’s
Court, off St Martin’s Lane. Aged 51, she had been born in Australia and brought up in South Africa. In the 1987 film about Joe Orton’s life,
Prick up your Ears, she was played by Vanessa Redgrave. Among the playwrights whom Peggy Ramsay
represented were Harold Pinter, Robert Bolt, Alan Ayckbourn, David Rudkin and
Joe Orton, all of whom must have climbed the stairs to her office about the
time that I went to see her. Like me, Orton
also met her in 1963, when he was 30.
She persuaded Michael Codron to stage Entertaining Mr Sloane at the New
Arts Theatre in May 1964. Orton’s
earlier play, The Boy Hairdresser, later retitled The Ruffian on the Stair, was
broadcast on BBC Radio’s Third Programme in August 1964, and Loot appeared at
the New Arts in February 1965. He was
murdered by his partner, Kenneth Halliwell, in August 1967.
The Christmas of 1963 was spent in Edinburgh. I stayed with my mother and we went by bus to
my sister’s home to spend Christmas Day with her family at Broomhall.
Back in London
at the beginning of January 1964 it was cheering to get a cheque for £75 from Methuen, ‘being an
advance on account of royalties to become due on sales of The Miracles.’ I had never been paid so much before for
anything I had written or done. It
seemed a fortune – and there was more to come when the play went on sale.
I got in touch with John Duncan, Bill
Tydeman and Keith Miles, who’d all had a hand in the version of the play
presented by Univ and they had no problems with me being credited as the sole
author. After all it had been my idea
and I had been the sole compiler and translator of the mystery plays
involved. I wrote an introductory
preface for the plays about their genesis and about the revisions and additions
I had made -- some extra dialogue for the Shepherds, the Detractors and the
Torturers, and three new sections – the Angel and Joseph, the Baptism of Jesus,
and the Last Supper. At the end I also
added some notes about the Univ productions and included an expanded
alternative play, with dialogue, for the Resurrection. The Miracles was dedicated to the creators
of the original mystery plays and to Richard Samuel, our technical director at Oxford and in Edinburgh,
who had collapsed in a street and shockingly died of a heart attack the
previous year.
Galleys arrived in May 1964 and page
proofs in June. The play was published
as The Redemption towards the end of the year.
The hardback went on sale for 12/6 and the soft cover version for six
shillings. I held the printed version
of the play in my hands and turned the pages wonderingly – I had written all
this, this was mine, every word. It was
a kind of birth, my very own creation, and every time that anything I wrote was
published I felt the same.
I’m not sure why I changed the title. Publication gave me the chance to revise the
text and add some scenes and this new version seemed to need a new title. A photo of Peter Jeffrey on the cross was on
the front of the jacket and a large, bearded close-up of me, looking stern but
saintly, on the back. I didn’t much
like the jacket -- nor did I like most of the jackets of my future books (the
jackets of American editions were much better) – and wasn’t impressed by Methuen’s mellow approach
to publishing and promotion. In fact I
was hardly ever impressed by the way publishers handled the promotion of my
books. But in a hand-out entitled Methuen’s Modern Plays, I
was quite chuffed to be associated with Harold Pinter, Giraudoux, Anouilh, John
Arden, Bertolt Brecht and Oscar Wilde.
There were a few brief reviews, in The
Church of England Newspaper, the Rhodesia Herald, and The Baptist Times.
Over the next ten years or so, various
churches, schools and amateur drama societies asked for permission to perform
some or all of the plays. I usually let
them do so for free, only receiving a very modest income from the sale of
copies of the play. My hope was that
some provincial theatre company, like that at Nottingham,
might stage the play. In October 1964
I sent the Methuen
version to Peter Hall at the RSC and to Laurence Olivier at the National
Theatre. Both turned it down. Olivier wrote, ‘I am afraid that with the
formidable programme of work which lies ahead of me I shall not be able to read
it myself. I have, however, passed it
on to our Literary Department, where it will be read as soon as possible, and
they will advise me as to whether it will be suitable for the National Theatre
repertoire.’
If either Peter Hall or Olivier had
decided to stage the play, my life as a playwright or dramatist would have
taken quite a different direction.
In April 1967 I sent The Redemption again
to the National, this time to Kenneth Tynan.
He wrote back more expansively than the others had done. He said, ‘Some day we shall obviously have
to tackle the mystery cycles in one form or another, but at present we are
inhibited by the fact that the RSC has been working on an adaptation of its own
for some time now, and we have an agreement with Peter Hall to keep off each
other’s preserves. If and when he
abandons his plan we shall probably take another look at the cycles and your
version will certainly come in for our consideration.’
The first production of The Redemption, as
published by Methuen, would be at Consett in County Durham,
with a very large amateur cast, in 1970.
It would be a huge success. Terry
Cudden, who’d been at Pinewood with me in 1959, co-directed the play. But that’s another story.
Three years before this, in February 1967,
I had written at length to the Head of Religious Programmes at BBC TV about
recreating the Oxford production of The Miracles for showing at Easter in five
or six half-hour programmes, which would also include interviews with the
students taking part and show aspects of their activities and lives – a
precursor of Reality TV. Nothing came
of this, and nothing came of my attempts to get my ideas for plays and
productions off the ground. One almost
worked. ABC TV paid me £20 to write an
outline for their Arts programme, Tempo, on a theme I’d suggested, Prisoners
and the Arts, but the programme was never made because of cutbacks in
programmes involving large casts and long rehearsals. A door opened only to close.
In the meantime, Sid and Mette had moved
from a flat in North London, in Friern Barnet,
to a basement flat in Limerston
Street in Fulham. I used to visit them for a very welcome
home-cooked evening meal, and sometimes I’d meet up with Sid for a snack or a
coffee in the Aldwych or Kingsway when he was able to escape from his duties as
a lecturer in King’s College.
Eventually the Bradleys bought a small house in Sevenoaks, and their
first son (of three) was born in the spring of 1967.
Back in 1964 nothing much resulted from my
chivvying of agents and film and theatre companies in vain attempts to further
my acting and writing careers.
Although some casting directors agreed to see me, like David Booth at
ABPC in February 1964, no parts were offered.
The Mermaid Theatre’s casting director wrote, ‘I will mention you to the
directors and if they feel there might be a line of parts in the Jacobean
season I will phone you about a reading.’
In April, Muriel Cole at Associated-Rediffusion wrote, ‘I feel it is
unlikely that I can do very much for you as you are so tall against two of my
regulars in NO HIDING PLACE … However I have made a note of your name on my
“Tall Young Men” list.’
Meanwhile, I had revised All Our
Yesterdays, and as there was now a TV programme with that name, I retitled the
story Moving On and sent it to Giles Gordon, once a scruffy little boy at the Edinburgh Academy and the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe. I’d discovered – through the current
occupations of Edinburgh Academicals given in the Chronicle – that he was now
an editor at Secker & Warburg. He
replied, somewhat negatively, on 20 March 1964, ‘I am afraid we do not feel it
is suitable for our list. Naturally I
am prejudiced, but I do feel, trying to look at it objectively, that, whether
deliberate or not, the monotony of incident and the lack of characterisation
would prove the book rather hopeless for the average reader … We should
certainly be interested in considering anything further you might write, as I
am sure that if you were to write a novel now it would be very worth while.’
I rather gave up on Moving On after that,
as its style, let along its content, was not that of your average, or any,
novel. But Giles Gordon’s concluding
remarks encouraged me to continue with a novel I had started at the beginning
of the year -- which had its origins in a dream.
In the dream I saw a grave in a snowy
field, out of which footprints led away from it through the snow. How could this be? Was someone dead who was now alive? And where was he going? The snow became sand in my story, and the
theme of it became a tale of love being stronger than death. Beaches and isolated places were the
background, based on those I had seen in Sutherland and Jersey,
from where I had returned at the end of December 1963, my mind imprinted with
the wide, wintry wastes of St Ouen’s Bay and the rocky, tidal causeway leading
to the lighthouse at Corbière.
Another tidal causeway would feature in my
second published novel, Dragon under the Hill.
In all my books I visited the places I was writing about, not relying
totally on what I was told or read about them.
I needed to see for myself, to absorb everything about a landscape and
its weather. Place was and is important
to me.
What became my first published novel was
written as an apprentice work, as a test of my imagination and descriptive
powers. It was initially called The
Undiscovered Country. I had to convince
myself that as far-fetched as the premise of a dead man walking was, it was
real, and indeed I used to scare myself when writing certain scenes. The two leading characters were originally
called John Amy and Sandra, and in the first version they got married. Unusually for me I revised the MSS several
times and rewrote some sections. Later on I would cut and edit other books I
wrote and revise them but never go as far as rewriting them.
After a trip to Scandinavia in August and
September 1964, and plagued by authorial uncertainties and doubts, I sent the
opening chapters of the revised novel to Giles Gordon, who had left Secker
& Warburg and was now at Hutchinson, seeking his opinion as to the story’s
merits. I didn’t include a synopsis of
the rest of the story as I didn’t know whether I should continue writing or
even how it would end. Not surprisingly
he didn’t know what to say.
He wrote back on 23 October 1964 after he
and his wife had read what I had written.
He said, ‘We feel it is too dreamlike to be entirely successful and is
not quite in focus. The two main
characters are not realised sufficiently enough for the reader to be able to
grasp their identities fully and to be sympathetic towards them … There seems
to us that there is not enough emphasis that the couple are in love – there is
too much constant distancing in the writing.’
He suggested that I finish writing the novel ‘without paying too much
attention to detail’ and send the completed MSS back to him. He said, ‘I do think the book could be
worked up into something original and interesting.’ And he ended, ‘Incidentally I think the
sonnet is lovely.’
What sonnet? I don’t remember. And why did I send him a sonnet? Did I still have a dream that I might also
be a poet?
When I sent the completed story back to
him at Hutchinson
in April 1965, he turned it down. This
was temporarily somewhat depressing. He,
and the anonymous male or female reader who also read it to provide him with a
second opinion, were both confused by ‘this very curious novel’ as the reader
called it, as it was an uneasy mix of metaphysical speculation and a ghost
story. It was neither as far as I was
concerned. The reader wrote, ‘It is
not, I think, possible to take the author’s strange ideas as seriously as he
himself appears to do, but on the ghost story level it has a certain compulsive
readability as well as a powerfully evoked atmosphere … The story is told with
considerable assurance both in style and in movement. There are passages of real beauty in the
descriptions of wild seascapes … And there are moments of suspense and horror …
But when all is said and done I don’t believe that the book can be said to be
more than a macabre and speculative joke … It is hard to classify it or compare
it with anything else, for it certainly has its own original flavour … It is a
strange and problematical freak.’
Giles Gordon was even more negative. He said, ‘I must confess I did not enjoy the
book as much as our reader did. This
was not because of the quality of the writing, which seems to me extremely good
indeed, but rather the underlying ideas which I found difficult to take. It is, I think, a novel more difficult than
most to criticise as one is not in any way on familiar ground … Quite honestly,
I am not enthusiastic about it enough myself to be prepared to try and push it
through here. I don’t as a matter of fact, think it is a
novel we are best equipped to handle …’
This was a blow. I thought they were being too intellectual
about the story, which was of the imaginative and moody sort that Dickens and
Edgar Allan Poe might have written, not at all metaphysical and with no ‘ideas’
other than the single premise that love could outlive death.
By this time, the novel had acquired a new
title, Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, which was borrowed from a line in a poem
by a 14th century poet, William Langland, who wrote The Vision of
Piers Plowman. I turned that line into
a couple of loose blank verse lines from a fictional poet, Ross Guyot, which
were printed on the blank page preceding Chapter 1.
‘Neither the sea nor the sand will kill
their love,
Nor the wind take it in envy from them.’
Ross Guyot – and Guyot was a real Jersey surname – was in fact an anagram for ‘To S, yours,
G’. The actual dedication was to the
memory of my mother and father. As I
wanted at this time to keep my literary ambitions and TV news-reading persona
separate, I also briefly used Ross Guyot as an author’s pseudonym. Previously I had devised the pseudonym John
Honicombe as the author of The Redemption.
Over the next few years I sent the MSS to
five other publishers, who all turned it down.
After each refusal I rested and then returned to the fray. But eventually I went as far as revising the
book again, in the summer of 1968.
Still working on it, I took the MSS on holiday with me, as well as AD,
to Switzerland and Venice in July, and met
up again with Franca Sacchetto.
On the homeward train journey, changing
trains at Milan,
I dropped the bag containing the MSS, my sponge-bag, and a bottle of grappa on
the platform. The bottle broke, and in
the train compartment that we shared with a Yugoslavian couple, both doctors,
who invited us to join in their pack-lunch picnic and savour tots of slivovitz,
I spread the pages doused in grappa on the empty seats to let them dry. Whether this accidental libation pleased
the gods, or my boldness in sending the dried out but faintly odorous MSS back
to Hutchinson
worked some magic, I do not know. More
probably the story had improved after all the revisions made over the last four
years or so, and this time it was finally accepted by Hutchinson, who had been
the first publisher to turn it down. Fortunately for me, Giles Gordon had since
then moved on.
He had been replaced at Hutchinson
by Michael Dempsey, who happened to be a Cambridge
chum of Richard Whiteley, then at ITN.
It was Whiteley who suggested that I send the MSS to Dempsey. In this case the university connection and
not the school one helped – not to mention the fact that I was reading the
national TV News. Part of Dempsey’s
brief was to find new authors, and his decision to publish the book was
probably influenced by the opinions of not one but two readers, who both
concluded, after detailing a synopsis of the story, that the book ‘could be
published, with some revision.’ In
doing so they, preceded by Whiteley’s suggestion and Dempsey’ involvement, set
in motion the circumstances that made me into an author. Out
of such casual, chancy and oblique beginnings do careers take root and grow.
The female reader, Susan Sabbagh, very
sensibly said, ‘The author is well known and this will probably help … Definite
paperback and film or television possibilities.’ She also said, ‘If you like horror stories
(and I hate them) this is undeniably rather a good one. It is a powerful idea and, on the whole,
well realised. The beginning in
particular I found compelling, with its Bronte-like atmosphere of grim,
comfortless passion and bleak foreboding … When the body started to rot I
swallowed hard and read on, and up to the point where Sandra rushes off
half-crazed I still though it was horribly good. But after that, when the narrative leaves
the two main characters and most of the action is seen through the bemused eyes
of subsidiary characters, the tension and imaginative impetus is slackened, and
the original horrid thrill never quite regained. We have passed from the neo-Gothic to the
Hammer-Hitchcock.’
This was fair enough. Fortunately the male reader, Jonathan Street,
reported back to Dempsey more positively.
He said, ‘This book is a curiosity … It is a most original idea … The
plot is worked out with great ingenuity, so that very few objections can be
made to the mechanics of it … The style is good too, in the main, ranging from
Gothick horror prose to a rather flowery style to describe the feelings of the
main protagonists … The last scene, where Sandra follows the tracks of her
husband, and is followed in her turn by the policeman’s son, the policeman and
the doctor, had a special flavour all its own, almost a lyricism, interrupted
by moments of humour and horror … Altogether I found this a most pleasing
little horror story, with enough realism and enough pathos to make it moving.’ He suggested that much of the geographical
detail at the beginning of the story might be cut.
I
reduced these details and began the story in Sutherland, not in Jersey. I
unmarried my hero and heroine and changed their names. He became Hugh Dabernon – by then, having
taken up brass-rubbing as a hobby, I had done a rubbing of the oldest
full-length brass in Britain,
that of Sir John Dabernon, in Surrey. Hugh was chosen because of its antiquity and
sound. She became Annie Robins, her
Christian name shortened from Annabel. I was influenced in this by a poem by Edgar
Allan Poe, Annabel Lee, and thought of using a line from the poem as a title –
‘The kingdom by the sea.’ Or one of the
phrases in ‘And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under
the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel
Lee.’ I’d read all of Poe’s short stories and poems
and had also seen and admired all the lush and moody films made by Roger Corman
in the early 1960s which he’d based on those stories. But I
ended up calling the story Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, after the two invented
lines of verse attributed to the non-existent Ross Guyot. And I reverted to my own name as that of the
author.
The managing director of Hutchinson,
Robert Lusty, suggested in a letter that the title would be more marketable as
Neither Sea Nor Sand, despite the fact that my title was ostensibly a
quotation. This was patently absurd and
I disagreed. Imagine taking the ‘the’ out of The Return of
the Native or The Mill on the Floss.
The book was published on 5 May 1969 and
was priced at 28 shillings. It was
published in America
by Weybright and Talley in 1970, who without consulting me added a sub-title on
the cover – ‘A Modern Gothic Novel’ – which I suppose it was.
Two days before the novel’s British
publication I received a telegram from Robert Lusty, congratulating me on the
book’s publication. This agreeable custom wasn’t continued by
Lusty’s successor, Charles Clark, who at the Edinburgh Academy
had been Edmund to my Goneril and Cassius to my Brutus and as MD of Hutchinson published
some of my later books.
I wasn’t keen on Hutchinson’s jacket design for Neither the
Sea Nor the Sand, with its black border – and I loathed the lurid cover of the
Pan paperback, which was published in 1971.
It displayed a skeletal hand On
its May 1969 release the book hadn’t been promoted by Hutchinson at all. There
were no fanfares, apart from those in my mind, and no publishing party or
interviews But because I had been reading the news at ITN
for four years by then, it was reviewed quite widely -- although quite nastily
by the posher papers.
The Sunday Times was sneering; the TLS was
sarcastic; the Irish Press was rude; the Sunday Telegraph said the story was
petit Guignol rather than grand Guignol.
I learned over the years that anything deemed to be populist and not
obviously intellectual provided some bitchy reviewers with a chance to exercise
their alleged wit, and to be condescending and acerbic. Constructive criticism seemed not to be part
of their job. But the Daily Mail said
the story was ‘told with a fine macabre flourish,’ and The Scotsman said it
came ‘menacingly near frightening us rigid.’ The Sunday Mirror said approvingly, ‘It is a
story in the tradition of the masters of horror like Edgar Allan Poe. I was unable to believe it was a first
novel.’ I was happy with that.
A proof copy had been sent by my agent at
the time, Elspeth Cochrane, to the actor and film director, Bryan Forbes, who
was about to take over the film studios of Associated British (EMI). He’d already directed such excellent films,
like Whistle Down the Wind, The Angry Silence, and King Rat. He replied, ‘I read Gordon Honeycombe’s book
in Dublin over the weekend and I rather fancy it is one of the most
extraordinary documents that has ever come into my hands … It really is a most
concentrated and brilliant flight of the imagination and is also that rare
event a completely original piece of work. I can well see that properly handled it would
make an extraordinary film.’
Unhappily, when it was filmed by Tigon
Films in 1972, it was clumsily handled, and I learned the bitter truth that the
writer, on whom many others in the film business depend for a living, is
usually regarded as a hack, whose output can be rewritten and altered by the
director, by the actors and by practically anyone associated with the making of
a film. This also happens these days with
stage plays. I was contracted to write the
screenplay, but every time I complied with the wishes of the director, Fred
Burnley, and rewrote the script, it got worse.
So it seemed to me. Eventually the director took over and a woman
was employed to rewrite the brief dialogue of the so-called love-scenes – on
the nonsensical premise that a woman would be better at it. At a
press preview in Wardour Street
of the finished film, a man sitting behind me said to his female companion,
‘Well, I wouldn’t pay to see that.’ I
cringed and sank down lower in my seat.
Woefully I agreed.
None of the three TV plays that I scripted
later on was interfered with by others, and they all did rather well.
Publisher’s editors also interfered with
what I wrote. It seemed that their task
was not to edit the MSS but to reduce it and cut it into a more sellable
length. It’s true that books are
generally better for being shorter, but I didn’t like being told that 20,000
words would have to go and I was never happy agreeing to cuts being made of
paragraphs and even pages of my peerless prose. Proof readers also queried facts and
descriptions. In Neither the Sea a
proof reader thought my description of a caravan should be, not a ‘box-shaped
egg’ but an ‘egg-shaped box.’ To me,
there was a difference, and I insisted that my visualisation of the caravan as
a box-shaped egg should remain. But all
that is another story.
Time now to return to 1964.
After my week in Jersey I was back in London in January and
resumed my assaults on casting agents and theatre companies in the hope of
getting a paying job as an actor and the acceptance of what I had written and
hoped to write. I was now appearing
twice weekly at Chadwick Street, ie, visiting the Employment Exchange in
Westminster, where I queued, shamefaced, with others who were out of work, to
sign on, twice a week, and receive a payment of £3-10 shillings a week. I was on the dole for over a year.
Because of the nature of an actor’s trade
the persons at Chadwick Street, who queried whether you were actively looking
for a job and were not just there for a hand-out, were lenient about insisting
that you got a job – any job – and didn’t continue sponging off the state. And periodically, odd acting jobs did turn
up that reassured those who doled out the dole that I was really seeking
employment and was employable. But it
was humiliating queuing every week with the work-shy, the down-and-outs and
no-hopers, for the few pounds that enabled me to pay the rent. How I managed to exist on what was left I do
not know. Mrs Fradgley fed me every
morning and provided a lunch on Sundays.
The rest of the day I fed off sandwiches, cheese-burgers from Wimpy Bars
(the fast-food precursor in the UK
to McDonald’s), coffees, and half pints of beer, and was sustained by meals at
the homes of married and working friends.
In the meantime, I continued to write and
to embark on and pursue assorted writing projects.
One was a television play, United!, about
a football club in the Midlands, which I thought could be the basis of a TV
series – as it proved to be, though it wasn’t to be written by me. The idea for this came from Kenneth Ewing at
the literary agency, Fraser and Dunlop, who suggested I should stretch myself
as a writer by tackling a subject about which I knew next to nothing. How about a sport? Not rugby or cricket, which I had perforce
played, but the source of all the wins, draws and losses in my father’s
football pools – soccer.
My pocket London diary for 1964 has an entry for
Monday, 6 January – ‘10, Chelsea FC.’
This must have been when I met the manager of Chelsea, Tommy Docherty,
who’d responded to a letter from me asking him if I could talk to him about the
organisation of the club and if he would act as my adviser on the play. A Scotsman, he was affable and patient and
showed me around backstage, as it were, as well as the view of the ground from
the stands and the view of the stands from the pitch. I had never seen a football match, but
returned there to see Chelsea play at Chelsea, and took more of an interest in
soccer programmes on Mrs Fradgley’s TV.
A month later my pocket diary notes that I
was typing United! The play was submitted
to BBC TV later that year. They turned
it down. But the following year, 1965,
a new twice weekly TV series about a football club in the Midlands
appeared on BBC 1. It was called
United! I was
appalled by such duplicity and treachery.
Even the opening episode, dealing
with the team’s captain, played by Bryan Marshall, was similar to the main plot
of my play. But more about that later.
Incidentally, Kenneth Ewing at Fraser and
Dunlop was followed by Michael Sissons at AD Peters, the agencies eventually
amalgamating as Peters Fraser & Dunlop in 1989. My showbiz and TV agent became Pamela Juvenile
of New Management in 1969.
Meanwhile, John Duncan, who had come to my
rescue with the odd job more than once when I was on the dole, had acquired a good
job with BBC TV as a film director, mostly working on location. In 1966 he became a programme producer for
Music and Arts, and devised a 50-minute documentary about Architecture, which
he wrote and directed himself. His next
subject was Patronage of the Arts, in which he asked me to appear as an
interviewer. Filmed in various
locations, like Galloway, Blyth and a London pub, and including several
interviews, in one of which I talked, awkwardly, prompted by Duncan, to LS
Lowry, it was called Robbing the Poor to Help the Rich. The narration was written by Michael
Billington and Duncan, and the programme was transmitted on BBC 1 on 13 July
1967.
Virginia Ironside, TV critic for the Daily
Mail, said, ‘It was just a hotch-potch of semi-documentary sketches, interviews
with Roy Hudd (?), LS Lowry, pseudo-satire with Thunderbird-type dolls. Gordon Honeycombe interviewed both the real
people involved with councils, and the actors, pretending to be people on
councils. It became impossible to
distinguish which was real and which was not … The final discussion was equally
muddled.’ On the other hand, Stanley
Reynolds, The Guardian’s critic, said, ‘It was one of the most informative and
most light-hearted looks at the subject of art subsidies that you could hope
for. Straightforward interviews with
artists and people who pay for the upkeep of the arts were shuffled with
satirical sketches.’ He commended ‘this
lively and original technique.’
I was impressed by LS Lowry’s powerful
presence in his very ordinary domestic setting, and also by the stunning aspect
of Henry Moore’s sculpture of a King and Queen sitting like a boulder on a
remote Scottish hill. I was floored
when Duncan got me to interview people leaving a
classical concert in Blyth. The first man I nobbled had a stammer, and
as people flooded past us he stammered out a lengthy reply. Rather than rudely cut him off, cast him
aside and seize someone else, I felt obliged to ask him another question. By the time he’d stammered through a second
answer, the rest of the audience had disappeared. The interview wasn’t used.
Back in November 1962 Duncan had been
employed by BBC TV on a new satiric comedy show devised, produced and directed
by Ned Sherrin and called That Was the Week That Was (TW3). It was ground-breaking in that it was
loosely structured, open-ended, and the mechanics of the show, as well as the
studio audience, were shown.
Sherrin, who had studied law at Exeter College,
Oxford, put
together a company of performers and writers who all became very
well-known. The programme was presented
by David Frost and its various satirical segments were performed by Millicent
Martin, Lance Percival, Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, David Kernan and Kenneth
Cope, with solo spots by Bernard Levin and Frankie Howerd. Its sketch-writers became even more
famous. They included John Cleese,
Graham Chapman, Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, Peter Cook, Kenneth Tynan, Roald
Dahl, Dennis Potter, and Keith Waterhouse.
Richard Ingrams also wrote for TW3 and John Duncan filmed some of the
sketches, which were usually made on location.
Duncan
got me a ticket and I was in the studio audience for one of the shows. Apart from the free glass of cheap wine we
were given beforehand, I was much taken by the freewheeling aspect of the
programme and the fact that it was ‘live.’
TW3 was taken off the air by the BBC
before the General Election in October 1964, which was won by Labour with a
small majority -- the new Prime Minister was Harold Wilson. Its place was taken, in November 1964, by a
similar programme devised by Ned Sherrin and called Not So Much a Programme,
More a Way of Life. This lasted until
April 1965. David Frost again fronted
the programme, assisted by John Bird, Eleanor Bron, John Fortune, Roy Hudd and
Willie Rushton, with solo spots by Patrick Campbell and Michael Crawford, then
aged 22, posing as a bikie Mod called Byron.
One of the programme items that John
Duncan filmed was a send-up of some television ads, in two of which, filmed in
Roy Hudd’s home in Croydon, I appeared.
In one I was Dracula and bit Millicent Martin’s neck, and in the other I
was the body in the bath that came alive -- as in the very scary Clouzot film,
Les Diaboliques. In another spoof, an
odd cartoon-like series directed by Duncan, I
was a Cyclopean pilot who landed by parachute in a Soho
cellar. The series was dropped.
Duncan
may also have been responsible for my appearance in a TV play about Admiral
Benbow. Directed by Ned Sherrin, it
starred Donald Wolfit. I played a
servant and a sailor. It was televised live, and to cover the
changes of costume, characters and the moving of the heavy cameras from set to
set, Robin Hall and Jimmie MacGregor, frequent performers of folksy music for
the BBC, sang sea shanties. The sets
were cramped, complicated and looked authentic -- as I tried to look when
standing or flitting about in the background.
Wolfit was a surly, short and sturdy, ursine, unsmiling man. I had seen him play King Lear when he brought
his touring company to Edinburgh. His
performance was impressive, but that of his wife, Rosalind Iden, as Cordelia,
was not, and the other actors were, I thought, inadequate.
John Duncan’s considerable talent as a
theatre director was dissipated when he became a television director. Ultimately he became the Head of Light
Entertainment for Yorkshire Television, with comedy shows like Sez Les (Les
Dawson) until he abandoned televison altogether. By this time he was married and had a
son. In August 1978, attempting a
comeback of sorts, he put together an entertainment called An Evening of George
R Sims and invited Peter Holmes, Richard Hampton and myself to take part, along
with a young actress called Eunice Roberts.
The show was to be staged, not in a theatre, but in a room above a
bookshop in Harrogate.
John was now calling himself Jack Duncan,
and Peter Holmes, now married to the stage and film actress, Barbara Murray –
her first husband had been the actor, John Justin – was now William Holmes
(Bill).
Barbara had been a Rank starlet and John
Justin a handsome leading man, who starred in 1940 in The Thief of Baghdad and
later on in such films asThe Sound Barrier (1952) and Island in the Sun (1957). They had
married in 1952 – it was his second marriage – and had three daughters. They divorced in 1964. This may have had something to do with his
propensity for dressing up in female attire.
Barbara had appeared in Passport to Pimlico in 1949 when she was 20, and
I had seen her in Campbell’s
Kingdom (1957) and Up Pompeii (1971). She
was best known for her role as Lady Wilder in the 1960s TV series, The Plane
Makers, and would appear in other TV series, like The Pallisers and The Bretts.
Later on
I became friendly with Barbara, as she and Bill lived near Syd Norris and his
wife in East Sheen in South London. Barbara
and I had the same birthday, though she was seven years older than me (and
Bill). She used to complain, jokingly,
about his habit of taking snuff, which blackened the marital pillows. In 1978 I was awed by her stardom and her
beauty and totally mystified by why Bill Holmes and she had married. She travelled up to Harrogate
to be with Bill, and her presence during rehearsals not only unsettled him but
the rest of us.
George
R Sims was a prolific Victorian journalist, novelist, dramatist and poet with a
social conscience, and Duncan
had devised two hour-long shows taken from Sims’ articles and poetic ballads
with melodramatic and pathetic themes – he wrote ‘It is Christmas Day in the
Workhouse.’ Appropriately garbed in
Victorian dress, we performed for a week above the Harrogate
bookshop. There was a lot to learn and
remember, complete poems and stories, and on the first night Bill, Richard and
I dried, one after the other – after which we took our scripts, concealed in
folders, onstage and partly read from them. The event was thinly attended and wasn’t a
success. When it was all over, Richard
went back to making occasional appearances on TV and in films, and Bill went
back to being an English teacher at Raynes
Park Grammar
School in London,
where he shared his enthusiasm for literature, and life, with those he
taught. He and Barbara separated and he
died of cancer in March 2010. Duncan returned to running a secondhand bookshop in York.
Throughout the whole of 1964 I was living
at 32 Eccleston Street. When Nigel Noble moved back to Stratford I had moved
into a single bedroom at the back of the house.
It was a circumscribed existence,
largely limited by my lack of funds, and I was unaware that London was in the throes of the youth culture
of the Swinging Sixties.
Hot
dogs, cheeseburgers and Coca-Cola were the favourite foods and drink, and cheap
eating-places like The Golden Egg were much frequented, especially by me. Mary
Quant had invented the mini-skirt, and colourful fashions for the young were
sold and seen in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and in Carnaby Street. The upbeat music of the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones was on the radio every day, and clubs like the Ad Lib and the
Bag o’ Nails, forerunners of discos, sprouted in out-of-the-way nooks in
central London. Dr Who was now on BBC TV, as was Top of the
Pops. The latter competed with ITV’s
Ready Steady Go for a teenage record-buying audience, who from March 1964 could
tune in to the offshore pirate radio station, Radio Caroline, which played
nothing but pop music. The Dave Clark
Five, with ‘Glad All Over’, had replaced the Beatles as No 1 place in the pop
charts in January, and were competing with other new groups like the Animals,
the Yardbirds and the Kinks. Manfred
Mann, whose lead singer was Paul Jones, aka Paul Pond of the Edinburgh Academy
and The Miracles, had a series of hits – ‘5-4-3-2-1’, ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’ and
‘Sha La La.’ In the cinema, Goldfinger,
the third film featuring Sean Connery as James Bond, appeared in September – as
did the first issue of a new tabloid called The Sun. Michael Caine, following his appearance in
Zulu, starred in The Ipcress File, which was released in March 1965.
It seemed that anyone with youth on his or
her side, and blessed with luck and perseverance, might become famous. I did my best to be so and, ever hopeful, continued
to phone and write to casting agents, play agents and anyone who might be
useful in giving me a job. Apart from
them, I see that my pocket diary contained the telephone numbers of former
colleagues at the RSC, like Eric Porter, Peter Jeffrey, Gareth Morgan, April
Walker, Maggie Roy, Denise Coffey, Martin Jenkins and Martin Best – not to
mention Peter Hall and Peter Brook. I
saw several RSC productions, most notably the stupendous epic, Wars of the
Roses, the three parts of which I saw in one day, at 10.30 am, 3.0 pm and 7.30
on Saturday 11 January. Film-going was
a weekly event.
The list of London
addresses in my diary also included those of Adrian Carswell, Ian Dewar and
Ross Anderson from the Academy, and that of Danny Penman from my time in Hong Kong. Those
from Oxford included Sid Bradley, Bill Tydeman, Syd Norris, Peter Stone, Keith
Miles, Richard Hampton, John Duncan, Ian McCulloch and Peter Snow (who had both
been in Richard II), Joan Newman and Meg Rothwell. I also had Diana Rigg’s address in Notting
Hill Gate and recollect playing bridge on a few occasions with her and Peter
Snow and Bunny Campione, a niece of the film actor, Stewart Granger and a
future expert on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow.
By one of those coincidental quirks of
fate, Aunt Donny moved in April 1967 into a guest-house run by Mrs Stewart,
Stewart Granger’s mother, in Grove
Road in Bournemouth,
where she occupied a tiny room at the top of the house. Back in 1964 she was still staying at the
Anglo-Swiss Hotel and driving up to Scotland for the summer months when
the hotel upped its room-rates.
I’m not sure of the year, but I once took
Vanessa Redgrave to The Establishment, a nightclub in Greek Street, Soho,
which had been founded in October 1961 by Peter Cook and Nicholas Luard. It can’t have been in 1962, when she and I
were both at Stratford
– and it was in April 1962 that she married Tony Richardson. In May 1963 she gave birth to their first
daughter, Natasha, when I was acting at the Aldwych Theatre. It was probably in that year. It was certainly rather bold of me to ask her
out, and foolish, as it transpired. Satirists
like Lenny Bruce and Barry Humphries appeared at The Establishment, but it was
more a showcase for stand-up comedians and music combos. The evening was a disaster, as I had very
little money, couldn’t afford champagne or any attentive extravagant gestures,
didn’t know how to entertain her, and was too aware of the professional gulf
between us. I was a spear-carrier and
she was a star. Fortunately, from her
point of view, she met some people she knew, and they chatted while I sat in
silent misery. I took her in a taxi
back to her flat behind Harrod’s and slunk away.
In my London diary, at the end of May 1964, I had
begun noting what the weather was like – ‘hot, hazy, cloudless,’ ‘thunder’
‘rain all day’, etc. I also noted when
strawberries and cherries went on sale, that I began sneezing on 30 May – I
suffered from hay fever for many years – that the Derby was on 3 June, that the
first day of the Test Match was rained off on 8 June, and that Trooping the
Colour was on Saturday, 13 June -- the day on which I travelled by train down
to Brighton.
This was at the start of a non-acting job
that lasted into August and put some money in my pocket as well as into my
bank.
It arose indirectly out of the brief
vacation job I’d had while at Oxford
as a teacher/guide for foreign students at St Clare’s in the summer of
1959. I must have heard at the time about the
Scandinavian Student Travel Service (SSTS), which also provided summer courses
for foreign students, though not at Oxford. I got
in touch with them early in 1964, and they booked me for two courses, at
Brighton and then at Bournemouth, each lasting
three weeks.
I remember very little about the Brighton course – where I stayed, where the classes were
held, what was done to entertain the students, who were divided up between me
and two others, one of whom was David Brownhill. I expect there were organised outings to
places of local interest, apart from visits to pubs, Wimpy Bars, and to any
sporting or other events that were happening in Brighton
at the time. The teaching was based on
the oddities of English colloquialisms, spelling, pronunciation, phraseology
and some idiosyncratic aspects of English life. The students were divided up into three
classes, I think, and we not only instructed them during the day but escorted
them to pubs or shows or otherwise entertained them in the evening. There were about 12 students to each class,
all between the ages of 18 and 20, and the English they had learned at their
own schools was generally very good.
Most of them came from Norway
and Sweden, very few from Denmark.
Although it was necessary to show no
favouritism, there were some who attached themselves to me, sought to walk with
me or sit with me, and some whose company I preferred more than others. Among them were Rolf Asplund from
Gothenburg, Tor Horn and Turid Klette from Lillehammer,
Ulla Stenmo from Eskilstuna and Lena Liberg from
Stockholm.
When the Brighton course ended I was
briefly back in London,
having exchanged addresses with those named above and some others. A week later, about 14 July, the second
course began, in Bournemouth. AD was away on her annual summer trip to Scotland,
seeing various friends and relatives and staying with some.
SSTS had rented a house in Knyveton Road in Bournemouth as the centre for classes and social
gatherings. It was next door to 34 Knyveton Road,
where, in a large house providing single-room accommodation and care AD would
wear out the last long years of her life, from 1988, and where she would die,
in 2003. And it was in Knyveton Road, at a
small hotel called Elstead, that I had spent my first weeks in England with my
mother and sister, in May 1937. In
1964, I was unaware that I had ever been in Knyveton Road before, albeit as a baby,
nor that it would play such a significant part of AD’s life – and mine, as I
often visited her there.
The students I met in Bournemouth included
Björn Granath and Gunnel Svenonius from Stockholm, and Oluf Helseth, Björn
Bakke and Mette Magler from Oslo. I
spent three weeks with the group and was back in London on 4 August, where I was with them at
a hotel overnight and saw them off the following morning at King’s Cross
Station.
It was while I was in Bournemouth
that I encountered another group, which was becoming a world-wide pop culture
phenomenon, the Beatles. I had heard of
them, who had not? -- they had recently triumphed in the USA -- and I preferred their songs
to those of the Rolling Stones. Some of
the girls among the Scandinavians were Beatles’ fans. It so happened that the Fab Four were
performing in Bournemouth while we were there, and I was asked if I could get
tickets for the show at the Odeon cinema.
I did, for about ten of the students, and we sat in the Dress Circle
while the Beatles, in their neat dark suits and inverted pudding-bowl haircuts
played far below.
What they played could barely be heard
because of the shrill, ear-splitting screaming that accompanied every
song. Not only that, the Dress Circle
shook and shuddered as hundreds of girls stamped their feet when they applauded
at the end of each song, screaming even louder. It was alarming and astounding, and quite
unlike any audience I, or anyone else, had ever known. It was evident to me that the Beatles
themselves were bemused by the torrents of sound that assailed them and
prevented their music from being properly heard. But they soldiered on, playing their early
hits, like Love Me Do, Please Please Me, From Me to You and She Loves You.
Within a few years I would meet Paul
McCartney and later on George and Ringo – but never John. But that’s another story.
At the end of the Bournemouth course, on 4
August, addresses and phone numbers were exchanged, and having accumulated a
few pounds from my employment by SSTS, I decided to follow up the students’
invitations to visit them in Scandinavia. After a few days in London,
I set off by train and ferry for Copenhagen,
arriving there on 7 August 1964.
By this time AD was in Scotland, staying with Alastair and Jenny
Fraser, who were now caretakers on a Scottish estate near Fort
William, and towards the end of August
she was in Edinburgh
during the Festival, staying with her cousin, Eleanor Ferguson, with whom she
attended a performance of the Edinburgh Tattoo on the Castle esplanade. She visited Marion, Jim and their two small
daughters at Broomhall and met up with my mother.
AD wrote in her Memories, ‘I also spent
some time with Louie who, I knew, had been in failing health for the past year
or more. Louie was always cheerful,
optimistic, and seldom spoke of her health problems. It was not until I went to say goodbye
before returning south that Louie spoke in a more serious vein. She was anxious, she said, that Gordon – or
Ronald as she always called him – was still unsettled and undecided as to the
form or direction in which his future lay.
She was supremely confident that in time he would be highly successful
in whatever field he chose to work, but meanwhile, having left the Royal
Shakespeare Company, he was without any permanent occupation. It was a worrying situation … Louie said she
had no doubts or misgivings concerning Marion’s
future and this was a great relief and comfort to her. Louie
and I had tea together and spent an hour or so chatting about various
things. When I was about to take my
leave she suddenly said, “Dorothy, would you look after Ronald for me if I am
not here – at least until he is married or more permanently settled?” “Yes, Louie, of course I will,” I
replied. “I will always do my utmost to
help both Marion and Ronald in any way possible. I can promise you that.” In October (I was now 65), I was back in Bournemouth and settling down for the winter months
ahead.’
Oblivious of my mother’s concern for me
and the fact that she was dying, I set off hopefully and expectantly for Scandinavia, on a visit to countries I had never seen,
and to meet up with the young persons whom I had recently met and hardly
knew. And I took with me the MSS of my
novel, set in Jersey, on which I’d started to
revise earlier that year.
14. SCANDINAVIA,
1964
There are two sources of material
dealing with the Scandinavian trip -- eleven informative but rather impersonal
postcards signed ‘Ronald’ that I sent to my mother at 4 Craiglockhart Road,
Edinburgh 11, and a 35-page Journal dating from 12 August 1964. Both have been edited for inclusion herein and
the punctuation modified.
The Journal had already been edited, as
some time ago I tore out parts of four or five pages which must have revealed
or said too much. I regret this
self-censorship now, as it would have been interesting to know what that ‘too
much’ was – not much at all, I expect.
However, most of it is reproduced here, as the Journal tells of a time
long gone and how it was then, how I was and what I did and whom I met. At the time I was 27 going on 28, about six
or seven years older than most of those I was visiting. During the day they were preoccupied with
jobs and studies, with the result that I was often at a loose end. So part of my spare time was spent in writing
– not only the Journal, but the early chapters of Neither the Sea Nor the Sand.
I arrived by train in Copenhagen on Friday, 7 August about 11.30
pm. I told my mother, ‘Found a hotel to
stay in overnight as Peter Mogensen, who I am to stay with here for a time was
on duty in a hospital – he’s a trainee doctor.
Meeting him at 3.0 this afternoon (Saturday). By chance met in the station three of the
girls who had travelled overnight by train from London – the girl students from the
course. So spent the morning in seeing Copenhagen with
them.’ A later postcard said, ‘Weather
here in Copenhagen
has been wet and grey – all very English.
Been watching TV, reading the papers, went to a restaurant, visited
friends, and today, after a wander around the town will go to a cinema and then
a theatre.’
I
can’t recall what I saw or what else I did.
Peter Mogensen, whom I’d met in London,
was a family friend of Sid Bradley’s Danish wife. Gathering material for my novel, I asked him,
to his worried puzzlement, for information about medical and physical facts
concerning death and decomposition. His
parents, in whose nice but immaculate home I stayed for a few days, were
proper, polite but distant, and Peter had a tendency to drink too much. I didn’t connect with him or with the Danes
and was glad to move on to Sweden,
where I’d be seeing Björn Granath in Stockholm.
I left Copenhagen by train on Wednesday, 12 August,
which is when the Journal begins, in medias res, on the train.
‘Due
at Stockholm at
7.15. The girl beside me is Swedish? Speaks English very well, but she’s dressed
in the obligatory red, white and blue of the Swedish girl. You’d think she was wearing nylons such is
the tan on her legs … The young American across the gangway, having failed to
establish relations with her – going to Stockholm, sailor on vacation, nowhere
to go, loves the country, feels tired – has dozed off again. The girl’s reading a paperback “Death in the
Blackout”. Here comes a conductor, smart-uniformed,
again. The first two that entered the
coach said “Good morning” and saluted when they came in. This coach is full of young people, of all
nationalities it seems, nobody talking, dozing or reading. The rows of seats face one way (towards the
engine) on my side of the gangway (I’m by a window) and face towards the rear
on the other side of the gangway. Makes
for easy chatting across the gangway …
‘Coming into a station, a lake on the far
side of it, and a giant finger of a radio mast. The express (six coaches) is electric. The engine connects like a trolley to an
overhead wire, but the local or suburban trains, which are halved yellow and
orange, must be diesels. This is
Nässjô. Dead quiet in Nässjô, even
though it seems to be a junction. Now
back to the parade of woods alongside, train going faster, making writing dodgy
… Sun returning, and me, I’ll return to my paperback …
‘Stopped at 4.15 at Linköping – been
travelling since 9.50. Large town, and
real Swedish people on the platform, and cars moving on roads. It’s been drizzling but has now stopped … Feeling
hungry now, not so drowsy, and fed up with reading Henry Miller. Hate those who write about themselves. Thinks – what am I doing? What am I doing this for? Answer – exercise.
‘In the buffet car I tuned in to a
conversation going on behind me between two Swedish boys and a small
weather-worn gent of uncertain nationality.
They spoke in English. The man,
who might have been a miner, spelt out places he had visited – had had a suite
of rooms in London,
£10 a day, and girls, three girls. He
was going to get some girls in Stockholm,
and invited the boys along. They
accepted his invitation, smoked his cigarettes, and vowed to show him Stockholm. He took their telephone numbers. The man had in tow a fortyish ill-looking
companion who spoke no English and sat at another table. “Give him tea,” the affluent gent exclaimed
to the buffet-girl. The tea-drinker, it
was later revealed, came “from Arabia” … One of the Swedish pair when he came
onto the train at Copenhagen, was wearing a pink straw stetson, a garland of
plastic flowers, carrying a guitar, and sporting a black shirt and red
tie. I left them enjoying a drink with
the foreign gent and his Arabian friend.
‘Back amongst the corn-fields now. Back to Henry Miller.
‘6.20.
Should be seeing Stockholm,
soon, and Björn.’
A
postcard written on Thursday, 13 August says, ‘Arrived here yesterday … and
will be here for a week. Didn’t do much
in Copenhagen
as there wasn’t much to do. But Stockholm seems more
promising, very modern and alive. Weather better now too. Living
with Swedish fellow and
his family in large new block of flats on a hill … Will be going out to a summer
house some miles outside on Friday, and then there will be an outing to Uppsala
sometime, and a day on somebody’s yacht.’ In fact I stayed with Björn’s
parents – he had a small dark one-bedroom flat of his own in the city.
‘Friday, 14 August. We’re watching the news on Swedish TV. It’s about 7.30. The Swedes have 625 line transmission, and
like most things here it is very well presented … I said “we”, which means
Björn, Jakob, his sister and her husband.
The mother’s in the kitchen. We’re
in the Jakob family summer house, about ten miles north of Stockholm.
Jakob’s grandfather built it himself – two rooms up, two rooms down, a
cabin in the woods. Sun over the tall
pines and firs and birches all afternoon.
Borrowed some shorts, and with the boys and the sister’s husband played
badminton over an ancient net in a clearing under the trees. Played twice in fact, when not watching the
Davis Cup on TV – Sweden
v the Phillipines. Time passed slowly,
and now and then I read Henry Miller on a red plastic sun-shaded swinging
chair. Supper was at 5.0 pm, which we
had on the verandah of the summer house …
‘Then there was a walk about this colony
of sudden roads and secreted houses, hundreds in fact. Then television, and then bridge. After another walk in the night – us three
boys – what? me and the boys, they’re only 18 – we went to bed about
10.45. Nervous-making having a slash
under the silent pines beside a bush.
There’s an outside lav in a shed, but as there’s no running water on the
plot, things tend to pile up so to speak.
So in the pale dark I communed with a bush for a few moments in
one-sided whispers, and thought of elks which, they say, roam the woods about Stockholm. And if there are elks, why not wolves and
woolly mammoths?
‘Back in the summer house and upstairs –
Björn in one bed, I in another, right angles to his, so we were able to share
some magazines which he had to read before putting out the light … All Swedish
to me. Kept being woken during the night
by Björn having a lethargic scratch all over.
Sounds as if you were in a kennel when it happens right beside your
exposed ear-hole. In the morning I
remonstrated. He said he didn’t scratch before he went to England.
‘Breakfast on the verandah, unwashed and
unshaved, in the cool air, coffee and hard bread and butter. Then shaved, in pan of hot water boiled on
stove, got ready and took off in Jakob’s car for the archipelago, whose centre
is Waxholm, for the summer house of girl-friend of Björn … Nothing happened for
about 20 minutes, and then we got a car ferry to one island, drove across, then
went over on another car ferry, all free, then drove to the summer house
direct. Why didn’t we do this in the
first place? Much time-wasting … No one
hurries, or gives much advice to those to those who are casually getting on
with it. No brisk British energy and organisation, not
much talking either. It usually takes a little time for everyone to
arrive at a meal or leave a house. Not
that anybody’s ever late. Time seems to
accommodate all that you want to do … We were back in Stockholm at 3.30 …
‘Björn was going to do some work in the
parcels office of the Central Station, 3.30 – 11.0 pm, just on Saturday and
Sunday. Seems they needed someone to do
overtime and, as he had worked in the Station before, they rang him up offering
this very well paid shift work. The
students get around in the way of jobs.
Both Jakob and Björn were prison guards in a State prison for about a
fortnight two months ago – not living in, just watching cell doors, corridors
and exercises. ‘Jakob drove me back to
the Granaths’ flat, after dropping the girls, Britt and Marie, at their town house,
and I had a chat with Mr G, and Mrs G gave us dinner at 5.0 pm. Very hospitable. Note – the men in Sweden never wash up, or help to
clear the table. The wife, or girls,
prepare the meal, announce it, and then the men occupy the table, make pleasant
conversation, praise the cooking, say “Skol” to the cook, and at the end of the
meal say “Thank you very much” to her …Then they retire to another room for a
cigarette, while the woman clears the table, washes up, and lastly brings in
coffee on a tray, and some biscuits or cakes.
Coffee is shared out, and the wife removes the cups to the kitchen, and
again on her own, washes up. This is
her respected position. The man works
during the day, makes money. The woman sees to it that his food is
well-cooked and well-served. The
kitchen is her province, the sitting-room his.
They meet in the dining-room and bedroom. It’s a finely balanced arrangement, and about
as simple as that.
‘Jakob picked me up at 7.0 pm and we went
back to his town house – the rest of his family were at the summer house … Jakob – his real name is Lars, his surname
is Jakobson – and I watched television, smoked, played the piano until 11.0,
then went to the Station to call on Björn.
He was not about, so we had a drink in a cosy bar. Two half pints cost about six
shillings. The bar had copies of
international magazines hanging on a wall for free reading, including The
Times. Had another look for Björn, but
were told he had left.
‘Back
at Jakob’s place, Björn rings, says he is tired, won’t be coming. So J and I arrive at the girls’ place about
1.15. A few Swedish boys turn up – they’ve all been
to a Suppé, a sit-down supper with drinks, no dancing – also two English
boys. Nothing happens, no drinks, people
sit, stand, move about, play records, dance, talk, smoke. We did
this until 4.0 am, then Jakob and I left.
It was full dawn. Didn’t feel
tired, but seemed to have been up for hours.
How can you sleep with grey clouds on a pale blue sky at 4.0 in the
night? But did, after reading an Agatha
Christie.
‘Later, it was Sunday. Up at 11.0.
To the girls at 12.0. Lunch at
1.30, Björn arrives at 3.0. We all leave at 3.20. Nothing happens. Watch television, play the piano, look at
comics, watch television, Davis Cup. People
telephone. Time passes … Jakob says
they never do anything on Sunday. And
they don’t … The Swedes, and maybe the Scandinavians, appear to lack passion,
intensity, depth of thought and feeling.
Where oh where has Garbo gone?
And Bergman?
‘Monday, 17 August … After Björn had gone out for his Maths
tuition, and I’d had lunch, I bussed into town to catch a bank open and cash a
traveller’s cheque … Back in the Haymarket, the modern shopping centre, I was
to meet Gunnel at 4.0. Just as I was
peering about looking for a tobacconist’s, I became aware of a girl watching
me. It was Lena. She had just finished a morning’s stint at a
laboratory, a vacation and study job.
So there we were picking up after Brighton
as if there had been no change of place or time. But I had to meet Gunnel under the stained
statue of Orpheus outside the Concert Hall … We had coffee on one of the low
roof-restaurants, then strolled about to see the Tourist Centre and then went
to a large store called NK … We were browsing about when I recognised the two
English boys who had been at Britt’s place on that late night session. What chance coincidence? That within half an hour I should meet the
only other girl (Lena) I knew in Stockholm,
and the only English people I knew?
‘Back to the flat for supper at 6.0, then
over to Britt’s place with Björn – the mother is still at their summer house –
for a drink. Jakob had bought some
Polish brandy. Two other girls were also
there, and the seven of us played roulette, with a toy wheel, imitation counters
and a plastic numbers cloth. I was first
bust – never have luck when gambling, except with horses, the Derby, etc. Ate sweets.
The brandy, between seven, though extended by Coke and ice, was soon
over. Innocent amusements after that. One girl left, I played the piano. Pecks
and wet kisses, murmurings in ears between Björn and Britt. Jakob was with Marie in the kitchen – but
they’re old friends. Jakob has an unused packet of contraceptives
called Regard on him. Björn has said
he’s rather serious about Britt. I
said, “As serious as you can be.” And
he said, ‘Yes.” It looks as if they’re
just good friends, like children the way they hold hands and never kiss fully
on the mouth. We left at 1.0 am.’
In a postcard to my mother written on the
17th, I said, ‘Been doing very little, as it’s expensive doing
anything that involves entertainment … Weather is warm during the day when the
sun’s out but pretty cool at night.’
I’d forgotten to send her a card for her birthday on the 9th,
and apologised I advised her to send
any money for me to the National Provincial Bank in Ebury Street, SW1.
‘Went to the Royal Dramatic Theatre that
night. Began at 7.30. The show was Som Ni Behager (As You Like
It). Ingmar Bergman is the boss man of
the Company, which includes opera and ballet and has, I think, four theatres to
work in. There was a starry Swedish
cast and the director was a famous old man called Sjøberg. The auditorium itself was quite small, only
about 18 rows in the Stalls … The theatre wasn’t full, two-thirds maybe. And the production itself, heralded by a
mass of fanfares, was like something out of the 19th century. They played it like an operetta, or a
pantomime, with lots of laughing and skipping about and without any consistent
characterisation. The set was modern in
conception … Bits of scenery kept being towed on and off … The costumes looked
as if they had been assembled from some amateur opera company’s wardrobe, a muddle
of styles and colours … Rosalind like a principal boy in a Robin Hood hat,
brown jerkin, tights and white blouse, and Celia tripping about in green and
yellow like a princess in country disguise … Jacques – the best actor I was
told – was dressed in black velvet, a white collar and a huge black cloak,
which he employed to good effect while others were speaking. He was always centre-stage, and gracious,
like a middle-aged understudy of Henry Irving giving a Sunday performance. The others I was with seemed to think it was
very good …
‘Wednesday, 19 August. Spent the afternoon with Gunnel, at her
flat, listening to the Beatles. She
showed me around the Town Hall, its two state rooms … Nothing grand about the
public buildings here, huge of course, made of masses of dark red brick, but
lacking antiquity and inspiration.
‘Björn’s tuition evening. They seem to go on for hours his tutorials,
up to three. I rang Lena
that we might go to the cinema but she was out. Would have been expensive anyway.’
The following day Björn and I went to Old
Uppsala, which was the centre of the ancient kingdom of the Ynglings. In a pagan temple people and animals were
sacrificed, and well over 2,000 burial mounds covered the area. Most had been flattened by farmland, but about
250 barrows remained. The greatest of
these were the so-called Royal Mounds, associated with three Swedish kings,
Aun, Adil and Egil. We travelled to
the modern town of Uppsala
first.
‘Thursday, 20 August. Uppsala is a smallish provincial town dominated
by the monstrous red barn-shape of the castle and by the twin dark-headed
spires of the cathedral, which was begun about 1580, with an interior not
unlike Salisbury’s … It was a pleasant day and sunny. We had hitch-hiked from Stockholm – took us half an hour (70
kilometres). Sometimes we were doing 140. But it took us twice as long to get that
lift. Took a bus later to Old Uppsala,
a few bungalows in a wilderness of cornfields and small trees, bisected by two
large roads. Between them lie three
vast burial mounds of Viking kings of about 500 AD … And by the mounds, which
have a well-worn track running over their grassy scalps from one to the other,
there is an ancient church in a copse, the original Cathedral of Uppsala, circa
1164 – painted ceilings and walls, and wooden remnants of time-served
crucifixes, and a slab in the aisle under which the relics of St Erik used to
lie. And concealed in trees was a
restaurant and tea-house, a great cabin with a plenitude of Viking nick-nacks …
Here we drank mead from silver-mounted horns, one inscribed with the name of
the Shah of Persia … Writing in the visitors’ book I couldn’t think what my
occupation was, so left it blank. We
talked a lot and later as we waited for the bus back to Uppsala there was thunder, and some
lightning, and the clouds massed.
Björn had a slash (a phrase I’ve taught him) behind a tree and I quoted
Shakespeare and we were not harmed by angry Thor … Having returned to the town
of Uppsala we had some beer before setting out to hitch-hike back. We waited for a lift for over an hour while
the night came over the clouds and it rained lightly now and then. And Björn swore in Swedish and I abused Shakespeare
(again) and we gesticulated after the vanishing cruel cars. We were walking back for a train when we got
a lift from a nervous Hungarian in a Volkswagen. Were back about 10.30. Supper.
Yum-yum.’
At some point during my stay in Stockholm I recall an
event that wasn’t featured in the Journal.
One night Bjørn, Britt and I visited two male and female friends of his,
who had a very small flat in the city.
As usual there was casual chat and the two couples casually watched TV
on a small set in their bedroom, propping themselves up on a double bed. As I remember there was a play on TV, or a
film, and of course it was in Swedish.
There were books on shelves at the bottom of the bed and I sat on the
floor and browsed through them. Among
the books was a pile of magazines, pornographic ones, and with apparent sang-froid
and disinterest I began to leaf through them.
Although such magazines were brazenly displayed on bookstalls and in
shop windows in Stockholm, I had never seen any in Edinburgh, or London (except
in Soho sex-shops, where they were hidden away in a back room or wrapped and
sealed in cellophane), and I had never seen inside them. This I remedied in that Stockholm flat and acquired a close-up knowledge
of male and female anatomy, and sexual acts, which I’d never viewed
before. It all seemed rather gross. I half expected the couples on the bed
behind me to start putting on a show of free love and unabashed intimacy, but
nothing, as usual, happened.
On Friday, 21 August, I left Stockholm by train to spend a weekend with Ulla in Eskilstuna.
‘Arrived Eskilstuna
at ten to six, raining much heavier.
Ulla met me with a car and drove us to her home, another flat, where we
had dinner: the mother, brother, Ulla and me.
Then we drove over to where I was to stay, in the flat of one of Ulla’s
male cousins. He was away. A bachelor’s pad … Everything marvellously
convenient … I browsed through the books in the apartment, all sailing or
school books. A photo album was
littered with snapshots of holidays: boating, sun-bathing, fooling about, camping. Mostly photos of his mates, smiling, joking,
working, arms about each others’ shoulders.
A few of the girl-friends, who were not smiling.
‘Saturday, 22 August. Two matters for today, both unresolved. On the back of my right calf, there’s what
must be a boil. There’s a wide, hard
area of flushed skin around what was once a spot. Has a square of elastoplast
on it. Tried to get, with Ulla’s help,
a boil plaster this morning. But the
Apotek said they had stopped getting boil plasters some months ago. Not a recognised or common complaint
here. This usually only happens to me
when I’m travelling -- on the boat back from Hong King, and on one of the OUDS
French tours. Both times – ow – I had
to have the thing lanced.
‘The other matter was when was I leaving
for Norway
and where was I to stay? So a telegram
was sent by phone to Tor, saying I was arriving in Lillehammer on Monday night. Was it OK?
‘A perfect day it was, a stiff breeze from
an azure sky, cool and wafting the heat away.
After 12 o’clock lunch, the mother, Ulla and I drove out to their summer
house for the afternoon. Once off the
main roads we were onto a winding dirt-track through the woods, where the wind
was blowing husks off the birch-trees, sweeping them along like snow flurries,
and already their leaves are turning yellow and falling. And the rowan trees, whose massed red
berries warn of heavy snows, are turning russet. The summer house overlooked a lake through a
partial screen of trees … It was very windy, and the lake was roughly shaken …
It was Swallows and Amazons, a childhood playground delightful with
dragonflies, splashed with butterflies and enlivened by wasps and crawling
insects. We sat on the porch, on fur
rugs, by an open fire … The Swedes work hard for their summer place, through
the long dark winters. Already, at the
end of August, it is autumn.
‘Sunday, 23 August. Before driving off to see Grippsholm Castle,
Ulla took me to the lady dentist who had paid a lively visit on the family the
night before, a family friend. She
understood the nature of my leg complaint, and wrapped it up with bandages and
wadding, and washed it with boracic acid.
Repeat treatment night and morning.
A funny lady, she spoke about her neighbour, aged 70, who walked about
her balcony in a diaphanous nightie, and was to be seen (by workmen opposite)
making lunch in knickers and a hat.
‘Grippsholm
Castle, like Frederiksborg in Denmark, is
full of pictures of past royalty, with the very occasional attendant in
evidence to guard the paintings, and the occasional vase of fresh flowers to
liven the dead rooms. But this place –
a great barn around a courtyard, full of small rooms, minute beds, long
corridors and sudden stairs – was fairly homely. No chapel.
What was once a chapel was
converted into a theatre by the queer King Gustav III, who wrote and acted in
his own plays – happy man – in his own theatre …
‘Monday, 24 August. Up at 5.45.
Ulla’s father was driving her to Örebrö to take the English exam paper,
from 8.0 to 11.0, so I went too, as the father was then driving on to Arvika,
near the Norwegian border, on factory business. A grey day … He chatted in his smoky voice
and carefully observed the speed limits.
We stopped at Karlstad
to buy some beer from a System Bolaget.
A clinical place behind great wooden doors, with a shy green sign
outside. This is the liquor shop, open
all hours, where, if you are over 21, you can buy drink, at a third of the
restaurant price … Once out of town we stopped for a tipple, and then had
another before reaching Arvika. By then
it was drizzling …
‘I bought my ticket for Lillehammer
via Oslo, and
set about trying to find Vera. She was
on the Brighton course. All I knew was her surname, but there were
several of those in the phone-book.’ I
was directed to her home by a woman in a school I chanced to enter, and she was
in.
‘Lucky?
Had lunch with her. There was a
mother who teaches German to juniors, a father who works at a factory, a
brother who composes ultra-modern music (no notes – he’s 19) and paints pop
art, and a Swedish chihuahua that cries.
Splendidly over-furnished warren of a house. Vera agreed, as Ulla did, that Stockholm people were
surface creatures, casual, easy-going, not strongly motivated. She was sad about the lack of individuality
amongst the Swedes, about the conformity of education (every one goes to the
same school, the dull or bright – and the same class). She’s 17, talks like an English girl twice
her age. Scandinavian girls grow up
very quickly, mentally, and are thinking serious things very early, and
thinking very little, contrary to legend, about sex. The boys meanwhile, when not having a good
time with their mates, think about sex now and then, try it to prove it’s there
and forget it until there’s a need to test and try again. What the English mean by “love” is something
the boys don’t give and the girls accordingly don’t get …
‘So I get the train from Stockholm
at 2.53 to Oslo
… An express train it was, but can’t have been doing over 50 mph. Stopped a few times at local stations … Very
sleepy – dull journey. Clocks have to
be put on one hour … Arrive at 6.50. Oslo like London
– narrow streets, chaos of building styles, sprawl of neon signs, scampering
people, trams, buses. And rain.
‘Change Swedish kroner to Norwegian
kroner. Left my luggage in a locker
after figuring out the non-English instructions. Mastered the telephone (25 øre). Thane Bettany not in. Mette
in, and after useful instructions from girl at Information, found my way by
tram to Mette’s place, Erik, Fred and
Thorvill came round also, and later saw me off in pouring rain in train for
Lillehammer. Had a compartment to
myself, which became excessively overheated.
9.30 pm to 1.0 am. Half way the
rain stopped, and I opened the window, lay down with the lights off, and
watched the whooshing parade of trees in the night … Got a bit thoughtful about
what the hell I was doing up here in the not so frozen North. What next?
But it was easier to teach myself some more Norwegian than ponder the
days ahead …
‘Tor was at the station with his father’s
car. Parents run a tourist
lodging-house. Was accommodated in one
of the rooms for the night. Long
day. Nice to see Tor – slow, steady gaze,
ready smile, a quiet animal, like a dog.
Is fond of dogs himself.
‘Tuesday, 25 August. Breakfast, in bed, at 10.0 am. Brilliant day. The town’s on a hillside, with parallell
streets. You can walk from one end of
the town to the other in 15 minutes.
Not hungry. Leg not so
good. Taught myself some more Norwegian
in the gardens below the school. Then
met Tor, Elseba, Kjersti and Sidsels when school ended at 2.15. Had tea together. Problems where I was to stay and how earn
some money were aired. Back to the
Horns’ Hotel for three-course dinner at 3.0.
Couldn’t eat much. Tor did. He lives in a hut at the back of the hotel
yard. While he did his homework there I
wrote. We both dozed off.
‘Went up the hill to the Youth Hostel to
see about a place for me. But the
Warden wasn’t about, so while we waited I had a think, read the rules, and
decided No. Walked down into town, down
along the rocky stream that cascades down the hill right through Lillehammer,
when not transformed into a swimming-pool, or diverted into pipes for the power
station, or made scenic as it passes the Terrassen, a many levelled restaurant,
or sucked into a mill. Once there were
waterfalls all the way. Walked about
the town with Tor and his bitch hunting-dog. He
greeted quite a few people, young and old.
Outside the Kino, the town’s only cinema, were droves of young men
waiting for the 6.30 show to start …
‘Met Turid and the others at 7.30 at the
Acantus, popular self-service rendezvous, a cafeteria on the ground floor of a
plain modern building. She had been
helping Life or Look or some American glossy.
She works sometimes as a guide at the local museum, and they had been
doing a picture article about it. She
had to go. Over Coca-Colas the others
bethought themselves where I might stay, and we trekked off to see one
landlady, who had guests in and wouldn’t promise regular breakfast. Another landlady was out. But as we were going to Kjersti’s home for
redcurrants and cream and television, two boys passed, one of whose parents had
a pension. So eventually, after
phone-calls from Kjersti’s marvellous comfortable hillside home (parents not
in) and a round of Damnation, Tor transported me and my kit to the pension at
11.0 pm. Live in annexe, bed and
breakfast, 14 kroner a day. Sharp
starry night, cool. The waning moon was
rising above the hills behind Lillehammer.
‘Wednesday, 26 August. Today it clouded over. Breakfast in pension: coffee, milk,
cornflakes, one egg, and help yourself to the various meats, cheeses, breads,
jams and greens on a wide table.
‘Met the gang in the school break at
11.30. Tried to find a job from the
second Headmaster, called Inspektor, but they had a money problem. Then wandered off to find the school doctor
who works in the High Street. Hopefully
thought I wouldn’t find him, but did.
15 kroner it was, but if I took a chit along to some insurance office
they would refund me some. I lay on a
table with my leg bared, and suffered not too much as the doctor pricked away
with a thingy to make the hole bigger and squeezed a little. With a new bandage I sallied out, feeling
brave, to meet Turid and Tor at the Acantus.
Later met Sidsels and Elseba when their school had finished – they begin
and end school at different times, according to the day and the class. T and T began at 8.0 am that day, finished
at 1.30. Had lunch (dinner), a plate of stew, in the
Acantus at 3.15. Then Elseba came with
me to buy some cotton-wool and shampoo.
‘On the way back to the pensionat, I was
stopped by a woman asking about street directions. What can you do but grimace, wave your
hands, and say, “I’m English”? People
are always asking me the way. Used to
happen quite often in London, and it happened
twice in the same morning, a Sunday, in Eskilstuna. I was merely taking the five-minute walk
from the apartment to Ulla’s place.
First a girl stopped me, and then a car pulled up beside me. Enquiries about street whereabouts …
‘Did some writing. One page.
Caravan scene – him out, she in.
‘Tor’s hut at 7.0. We did some Norwegian. Met Elseba, Turid and Sidsels at the
Terrassen at 8 o’clock. Three-piece
band playing om-pah-pah music. The
lower terrace filled up later – open-air dancing (drinks, 3 kr for a bottle of
beer; cigarettes 2.25 for ten, tipped).
Nasturtiums tumbling down amongst the vine leaves from the terrace
edges, lamps on stairs like pale moons.
Half the gang’s school was there, it seemed, also some tourists, not
many, and some soldiers. One of the
band played a musical saw, for which he was applauded.
‘Then to Elseba’s house – yes, the
Norwegians here actually have houses and gardens, not flats – for elevenses,
which it was. Waffles and coffee. Walked back into town with Sidsels and
Tor. Sidsels spoke about a house we
passed which was haunted by an old lady, who walked about, appeared behind you
in a mirror, knocked on doors, and generally made her presence felt.
‘Have to change my leg bandage every
morning, and night – ugh. The suspense
as to whether the bandage will come off without sticking is worse than the
sight it reveals.
‘Thursday. Large breakfast – two glasses of milk, three
of coffee, cornflakes, one egg, four different types of bread (like rusks or
Ryvita) with either jam/cheese/spam on them.
Strolled into town to collect medical reimbursement. They gave me, after checking my passport,
eight kroner. Bought postcards. Wrote
them up back in the pensionat.
‘Met the gang at 2.30 at the Acantus. Went back with Tor to his parents’
guest-house (Tourist-home) where we had dinner. I then had a bath, as there’s only a shower
in the pensionat and I could figure no way of having a shower and keeping the
bandage dry. I mean, you’ve got to
stand up, and washing yourself standing on one leg, with the other stuck out of
the shower curtain … Back to revising MSS.
‘Bandage keeps coming off, so have to limp
dramatically to nearest secluded bench, pull up trouser leg and unwind yards of
bandage to disclose horrid wound. At
the pensionat played bridge with Elseba, Turid and son of family who runs the
pensionat, Geir. Finish at 10.30, go to
bed, fall asleep over Norwegian strong verbs.
‘Friday, 28 August. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. After the abscess – those ruddy piles. Not too bad today. Don’t at least have to walk as if I’d been
riding a horse all day. Still,
walking’s impeded, and I didn’t dare walk down as far as the lake which I’d
have liked – it being so fine. Instead,
revised the MSS till 1.15 then bought and wrote PCs. Met everyone at 2.15 as usual. But all are working, one way or another,
tonight. So back to the pensionat after
3 o’clock lunch … Was strolling – ow! – into town later on when the bandage
fell down. So dropped in on Tor, who
was working on the American-style station wagon run by the family. His eldest brother was with him. Reset bandage in Tor’s hut. Like a
den it is, no windows open and thin curtains drawn over the windows. It’s like a lair, hot, panting
atmosphere. He seems impervious to heat
or cold, goes around always, night and day, in same dark blue open-necked,
short-sleeved shirt and charcoal trousers, no jersey, no vest. The Viking type, short fair hair, blue
eyes. He has three brothers, whom he
doesn’t care for much. Tor’s the third
in age. They’re all fair and
eagle-eyed, and just under six feet.
They only speak to each other when necessary and don’t speak at all to
strangers. A thousand years ago they
would have been the source of sagas.
Now they’re engineers of sorts.
Tor’s off north this weekend to kill a reindeer for the family.
‘Sat alone in Terrassen for an hour among
the nasturtiums, geraniums and wasps.
One glass of beer and three cigarettes.
The three-piece band below was playing very evocative melodies and
competing with the soothing rush of the waterfall over the weir, so it was all
very pleasant. But it got chilly. So walked over to the Acantus for a
coffee. The Acantus during the day,
even when busy, is never quite full.
It’s a self-service place, air-conditioned, and they always have flowers
on the tables. The Norwegians are even
more wild about plants than the Danes.
The interior of every house is jungly with them. Instead of animals, they keep plants, and
train them to climb up walls and around windows and not shed leaves on the
floor. They’re also wild about original
oil-paintings of Norwegian scenery, which they splash all over their
living-room walls, and in the hall you’ll usually find a study in oils of a
nude (girl). Not asked yet whether
these nudes are relations. In Stockholm, in Britt’s
place, the pictured nude was her mother.
‘In the Acantus were Turid (just finished
working on an essay in the library) and two friends – joined by others
later. They didn’t eat or drink, just
sat and chatted, gentle fun. Turid was
looking her honeyed best, all dressed up for working in the library, and
flashing her eyes (bright but very dark blue) at everyone and interpreting the
occasional Norwegian for me. She was
being slightly grown-up and reproving the others for their boyish or girlish
sallies. Her best friend, who is
dark-haired – Turid is fair and has what is known as a milk and roses
complexion, with a suggestion of freckles thrown in – is a Shirley Maclaine
character: the same eyes, long legs and quick movements.
‘Went back to the pensionat at 9.0 to
watch Maverick. Only three hours of TV
in Norway. The film was preceded by a lecture on the
Casanova-fish, a kind of small shark.
When I came in, the lecturer and the interviewer were merrily pulling
the guts apart, in close-up … And so to bed early, as my biro gave out. Oh yes, Turid, who is my poste-restante,
gave me a pile of letters sent on from Stockholm, inc some from Sid and those
that had gone missing in the strike.
‘Saturday, 29 August … 10.30 into
town. Coffee at Acantus. School break also, and Elseba, Sidsels and
Turid turned up. 11.45 at
pensionat. Wrote postcards, and this,
till 2.10. Acantus – it’s now raining
slightly, and it continues to rain and mist all day. Turid and Marit, the best friend, at
Acantus. Back at pensionat, wrote maybe
three sentences and changed as many in MSS.
‘4.0 pm, Davis Cup on TV – Sweden v Australia. Watched until 6.0. Game was Emerson v Lundqvist. The latter wins first two sets, crowd very
excited. But Emerson ploughed his way
back. Two games all. Swedes very partisan. In the last set every mistake of Emerson’s
was applauded, and every point gained by Lundqvist hailed with cheers. Not sporting. Not British. Halfway through the last set Emerson stopped
caring, and at the same point Lundqvist stopped caring too. Smiling he lost his service and let the
game, tamely, go to Emerson. As if he
had said to himself – I could have won, but who cares? I don’t.
Nonetheless the King of Sweden, grinning all over the place, seemingly
unattended, congratulated Lundqvist very warmly.
‘Back in my own room, warmed up on the
MSS, but had to stop to get to the School at 7.30, to see visiting Dryden
Society (Trinity College, Cambridge) production of Coriolanus – given on stage
at one end of the gym. Cast of 26. Up to good college standard, not too much
beautiful diction from the leads, and not too much buffoonery from the smaller
parts. Costumes a bit primary, but they
fitted. Lasted from 8.0 to 10.45, with
two intervals. Coriolanus doing an intellectual
Finney, and Menenius a modified Gielgud.
‘Sunday, 30 August. Was in Acantus by 1.15 and later Turid
turned up and then Marit. Went back to
Marit’s place to watch TV – Davis Cup, doubles. Australians pushed the Swedes out of the
running. Oh, finished Chapter 6 this
morning. In Acantus again at 6.0 for
supper (had some tea at Marit’s place).
Then on to the Kino to meet Turid, Elseba and Sidsels. We saw Tamahine. The
programme was a series of local adverts slid onto the screen, one short
(Hungarian) about a romantically impoverished district immortalised by some
poet, and then the big film. All out at
8.45. Next show at 9.0. All seats 3 kroner. Sub-titles of course in both films. Straight onto Terrassen, which closes tonight
– getting too cold for outdoor dancing … Most of the Dryden Soc were there, but
we didn’t stay long as Marit organised us to go to the Banken, a restaurant
with a dance floor … Didn’t do any dancing myself ...
‘Monday, 31 August. Woke up late (10.0) after a dream that Sid
was dead, having killed himself by exploding something against his middle, that
his face was now a hideous green mask, and I was very, very desolate, and
thinking of finishing it myself. Only a
dream – of course. But could use the
desolation feeling in the book. Woke up
thinking what the hell am I doing here in Lillehammer,
with no particular place to go? Feeling all at sea. Raw and gusty day, north wind blowing down
on the sun. That Monday feeling. Everyone choked off, pre-occupied. Spent about three hours in the Acantus. Actually wrote two short and simple poems in
about 20 minutes … ’
Both poems are seemingly suicidal in tone,
although no such thoughts in fact ever crossed my mind. Living was a daily delight and
surprise. The first was …
‘Why should I die for you, my love?
You never died for me:
Why should I show for you my love
And cease to love and be?
Would you remember I lived for love,
Remember I lived for you?
And when we both are dead, my love,
Who will remember – who?’
And the second …
‘There is a place of soft content,
Peaceful, fair, and free:
There would the hours pass well spent,
By one, by two, by three.
I know this place for love is meant:
Here life and I agree;
Where is this place of quiet content?
Not here, not here, for me.’
‘Up the hill above the town, out on a
walk, I discovered the grey wooden slope of a baby ski-jump, which nonetheless
had a precipitous slope on the landing end.
Surrounded by very tall birch trees.
So I smoked a cigarette at the base of the jump and lay along the wood
and observed the road of ants that hastened around the base of the jump and
into the woods, coming and going, thousands, carrying their prizes in one
direction only. Some with the dead,
some with grubs, some with sticks, one with a beetle, one with a wasp’s
head. Inevitably I started thinking in
metaphors or similes. There was I observing
their progress and feeling divine, helping some who struggled with their loads,
impeding others. And if I took one up
and killed it, none of the others would notice. They would go on with their tasks. Tracked the ant road a short way into the
woods and found the sprawling ant heap around the base of some trees, a mass of
brown fir and pine needles and swarming with purposeful citizens. I picked up a long twig and prodded into the
minute doors, and flicked up great showers of needles and refuse, looking for
the larders, and nurseries, and great galleries, looking for the results of
their labours. But there was only a
confusion of rubbish and ants. So I
took my divinity elsewhere, tramping down the ant road, leaving death and
confusion behind.
‘Notable discovery – Øyvind is Oluf’s older
brother. Not a bit alike, Øyvind being
shorter, tougher, quicker … With him were two mates. One was Sjur Linberg. Having failed to get into Oslo University,
he hopes to make a German university to study medicine … We four were joined by
a cute Norwegian filly, Anjo, with a strong American accent and looks. She’s going to be a substitute teacher in
the High School here in September.
‘Tuesday, 1 September. Nothing special, but gorgeous day. Sunbathed on back terrace of pensionat. Wrote some more of MSS.
‘Been thinking that England has much more in common, in spirit, with
southern Europe than with these people of the
same race. I’ve been here a week, know
quite a few of the kids. They all know
I’m writing a book and pushed for money, but no one thinks to ask me to their
house for a meal or a drink. It’s just
not done. It’s not just me either. Imagine if some Norwegian young man was
holidaying in some English town, like Stratford,
and that he knew a few of the Sixth Form.
Wouldn’t they ask him home for tea and stand him drinks in the
local? And ask him what he thought of
this and that? And generally be
interested? I’m still at a loss to know
what the younger Norwegians do in their spare time – they seemingly don’t have
any hobbies. There aren’t any school or
other societies, and they don’t go to each other’s homes, unless there’s a
party. I don’t know.
‘Into town at 6.0 to have a snack at the
Acantus. Had managed some writing in
the afternoon. At 6.30 Sjur turns up –
we were meeting up with Øyvind to go to the pictures. But he doesn’t turn up and when we go to the
pictures we find out why. The next show
doesn’t begin till 8.30, being a long film.
So Sjur and I go back to the Acantus for coffee and then to Banken for a
beer. I am going on a bit about
Norwegians (see above) and he’s keen on disproving my ideas, and goes as far as
buying me a beer and asking me all about myself. He’s lonely also – his girl-friend is in Ireland. Then to the film, A Gathering of Eagles –
Rock Hudson, Rod Taylor. A horribly
fascinating Boy’s Own account of the routine of an atom bomber base … Think of
the millions spent on these planes, ever ready to destroy millions at the push
of a button and the breaking of a code.
And always there are six planes aimlessly cruising above us, waiting.
‘Out at 10.30. Øyvind and a Swedish mate who’s domiciled
here were also at the cinema. All the
cafés are closed, nowhere to get a coffee.
Walking back to Longva (the pensionat) I ask the Swedish boy and Sjur
how to telephone Oslo,
hoping that, as we’re very near Longva, they’ll come in and show me how. Sjur leaps in and says, “Come up to my
place. I’ll phone for you there and
we’ll have some coffee.” But the
Swedish boy is not invited. His poor
mother goes and makes the usual spread of bread and bits and coffee and
chocolate, and sits and listens to the English visitor, very proud that her son
can talk English so well. There’s a
younger brother, 17, who sits and reads a thriller and tunes in with one ear
and one eye. Anyway I’m overwhelmed by
all the attention and very grateful to Sjur, and we talk. Eventually the mother and the brother go off
to bed. And I don’t leave in fact till
4.0 am.
‘Sjur has somewhat romantic notions about
me – penniless writer at work on great novel, alone in foreign country. Romantic background too – India, Hong Kong,
Oxford – and he feels I must be wise … Finally, I have to tell the whole story
of the book, and he listens wide-eyed and says it’s “marvellous”. He thinks the end is a “victory” for
her. We finish off with a few ghost
tales and the like. He’s 19, as tall as
my shoulder, and doesn’t take himself too seriously, though he would like
to. Favourite pastime, football – his
team won the Norwegian Junior League. He also plays the piano. At the moment is under doctor’s orders,
having recently had broncho-pneumonia, so out of doors he always wears a
raincoat and a pale blue turtle neck sweater.
Walks heavily, stumps about almost.
Is colour-blind (red and green) and his eyes have dark pupils. Frequently grins, lifting his head back as
he does so. The family live in a small
flat. The father died last year, and
some years earlier the father lost his business – the biggest store in Lillehammer – because
someone had been embezzling the firm’s money, altering the books, while the
father was in hospital. Not discovered
till annual stock-taking. There was a
trial, father chief suspect, nothing proved.
But he had to pay the loss, some hundred thousand kroner. You can see that the mother, who now looks
much worn and not well, has been much affected by the scandal – as it must have
been in Lillehammer. Sjur speaks very good English, although he
wasn’t on the Language line at school.
He’s a scientist and mathematician.
Speaks with as much a Norwegian accent as an American one, and not much
of either.
‘Wednesday, 2 September. I haven’t been here a month yet – it will be
a month on Friday. But it feels like years. 7 August I arrived in Copenhagen.
Today I began to think about returning to England after Göteborg, and about
the problems of finding somewhere to stay and some money to make. Could return to Eccleston Street. But what job? Moreover, would like to be in England for my
birthday and the publication of the play.
Really though, come to think of it, am not interested whether I’m in England for
birthday and publication. It’s merely a
matter of there being more to do and see and say in London.
No jobs here – haven’t heard from Stockholm,
and the Lillehammer
possibilities as a teacher in the High School and a teacher in Elseba’s aunt’s
boarding-school never materialised.
Wrong time of year. No one’s
thinking that far ahead to their exams, and since English is taught for so long
and seemingly so well, no one really needs a private tutor.
‘Another super day. Acantus at 11.30 and 2.15. Sun-bathing afterwards on Longva back terrace
or in the garden, which is a mass of grassy slopes and fruit trees, apples and
plums, and gooseberry and raspberry bushes, and on one sunny slope, a three
foot high, brightly laden cherry tree.
‘To Øyvind’s house at 6.0. Didn’t go in, ate gooseberries in the
garden. Then with him, Sjur, and the
Swedish boy, who has the splendid name of Jerker Angentyr, and intends to be a
seaman, went for a walk up the hill alongside the waterfalls, high above the
town in the woods. A great, rocky,
broken descent the stream has here – a stream now, though in spring it’s a
roaring river … The other three were all fun and laughter, though Sjur was
still being slightly serious – running and chasing, tripping each other up,
playing at being Red Indians, throwing rocks.
We came down the other side of the falls, down to the ledge above the
town where the Youth Hostel is, and where on two open steps of land are the
football grounds, open to the landscape all around, with the crest of the
fir-covered hill behind, where the ski-jump is, the big one.
‘Watched the two local junior teams playing
each other. Sjur’s brother plays
centre-forward for one side. Left at
half-time, 7.50, just as the sun was touching in golden sheets of light the
eastern crest of the hills. To Acantus, where, being Wednesday and
theoretically a night out, most of those I know were there. More innuendos and nonsense, with tea-bags,
straws, cigarettes, and little pretends.
People eventually just disappeared, and I was back in Longva at 10.15,
with nothing to do but go to bed. It
doesn’t get dark until about 10.0 pm.
‘Thursday, 3 September. Seemed to spend most of the day wandering
about with Sjur. The Sales are on – I
was looking for a jersey, got one, a blue-black sweater, for 29 kroner.’ I could afford it, as my mother had sent me
£15. ‘No writing, not till I at last
got back to Longva at night, and after reading an Agatha Christie, wrote some
more in bed.
‘Got windy in the afternoon, so Sjur et moi
were sitting on the back porch, reading, when the landlady came out with some
coffee and goodies for us. “Now aren’t
the Norwegians friendly?” he said. I
said it was only because he was there that she brought us anything. He said, “Maybe that’s right.” Anyhow, it was very nice. There was supposed to be bridge in the
evening. After a bath at Sjur’s flat,
we went to the Acantus to meet Øyvind at 7.0 pm. Two hours later he still hadn’t shown
up. At first Sjur wouldn’t phone, but
when he did, he found that Øyvind had gone out to a friend’s house. Anjo was with us, so it wasn’t too
dull. She showed me a poem she had
written, in English, Old English style.
However, by 9.15 I’d had enough, and left them still sitting there.
‘Walked to Tor’s hut – he’s back, and has
only been in school for half an hour that morning. He wasn’t there, but the eldest brother had
just driven back in his car – he’s called Jarl – and seemed to want to talk, in
English. So we did, outside in the
yard, I not understanding all that much of his English, not clearly that is,
but saying “Yes” and “Ah-ha”, so that he was not rebuffed. He’s a planner of roads and an inspector of
road-making machinery. He’s smaller
than Tor, and he may have eagle eyes – the nose helps – but his are of a
fledgling eagle, round and staring. The
youngest brother turned up, with news of Tor’s whereabouts, visiting, so I
wished them goodnight and left. The
fourth brother doesn’t live at the Horn Home, he’s married.
‘Did some writing in bed from 11.0 till
1.0, but was both beginning to frighten myself and fall asleep, so stopped.
‘Friday, 4 September. Finished off revising and rewriting Chapter
7. Bright day again. Was outside on the Longva terrace. Visited Tor at 6.0. We talked maybe for about ten minutes, and
then he got on with his homework and I read magazines and books that were lying
around. Nice just to be with him, very
comfortable presence.
‘Then to Acantus for 7.0 and Sjur … Anjo
arrived … She was feeling ill with her cold, and Sjur was feeling
feverish. Øyvind turned up. It was his birthday yesterday, 21st,
but absolutely no celebration. Everyone
splits up about 10.0 and wanders off home.
Sjur lives my way, and asks me up to play chess. We don’t play chess, but have some eats and
talk till 1.45 this time. He keeps on
being interested in me, and we discuss marriage and ideas of living and the
reason why. I voice a few opinions, and
he thinks I must be a Communist. Then
he starts trying to pair me up with Anjo, certain I must be in love with her,
but accepts it when I say “No.” He’s
just had a cool letter from his girl-friend in Ireland … He says “I like you”
several times …
‘Saturday, 5 September. Supposed to be canoeing on the lake. But the weather was cold and grey. End up in the Acantus. Still there at 1.30. Anjo turns up, then Sjur … Before lunch, at
2.30 in Acantus, buy a pair of black corduroy trousers, 45 kroner. Turid and Marit arrive. There’s a dance, organised by the kids to raise
money for themselves, in the school that night. Sjur’s playing the piano. Say I’ll drop in on them while they’re
practising before the dance, which beings at 7.30. Anjo doesn’t dance, doesn’t drink, and
might, if she’s feeling well, be at the dance at 10.0.’
After that entry several pages are missing
from the Journal, which jumps from the 5th to the 12th,
when I was in Oslo. I don’t recall what happened in the interim,
except that when I left Lillehammer on the 11th,
by train for Oslo,
Sjur saw me off. As I had already said
goodbye to all the others and was facing a very uncertain future, I felt very
low.
A postcard to my mother, written on the 10th,
said I would be staying in Oslo
until Tuesday, 13th, when I would travel to Gothenburg. There I would stay for a week with Rolf
Asplund, at Örgryte, Stomgata 69, after which I would return to London, flying there from Oslo, as it was cheaper.
The Journal takes up the story again on
Saturday, 12 September, when I spent the day with three friends of Thane
Bettany, who lived in a house on an island off Oslo.
The house belonged to an artist who owned most of the island. Thane I had met at Stratford
through Murray Brown, and I met up with him when I returned to Oslo on the 11th. At the time he was Artistic Director of the
English Theatre Company in Oslo.
‘We do nothing all day, except eat and
they talk. I’m still not adjusted to
being back in the full theatrical swing, being half in Lillehammer, so am very silent. There’s an adolescent neutered black tomcat
in the house – they’re all mother to it and pet it a good deal. They’re all of course queer in different
degrees, and frequently go into mild raptures about the weather, or the view,
or the cat, or the autumn leaves that Barry arranges in a huge vase, and
thoroughly enjoy each other’s cooking, and it’s very good. Apart from “how divine”, “it’s marvellous”,
“delicious”, there’s the casual throw in of “my dear” and “honey” and they
frequently refer to each other as “she”.
But, the vocabulary aside, and references to “cruising” and “beautiful
Norwegian boys” and the adventures of certain friends, it’s all quite ordinary
and idle, not too camp or outrageous.
They’re all about 30, but it’s difficult to say. Thane is 35, but doesn’t look it. Young old Richard arrives at 10.0. Obviously all the others are especially fond
of Richard, who with his slightly grey crew-cut sometimes looks old enough to
be everyone’s father. However, really
he’s quite boyish, and is mildly provocative in his American-Norwegian burr –
“I once had an affair with a negro boy, he was so outspoken,” and apologises
for talking like that in front of a stranger.
Later, after Barry has gone to bed with a play, The Rose Tattoo, which
is “incredible”, I leave at 12.0, walk down with Thane and a torch to the
ferry, and on the other side I get a bus to the Town Hall.
‘Sunday, 13 September. At last had a bath, after asking permission
…
Thorvill
with a car, Mette and Erik and Fred, arrive at 12.45, and drive me about until
3.0 pm – to Holmenkollen, Tryvanns
Tower (neither of which
we climbed) then to Bygdøy, and I saw the Viking ships and the Kon Tiki. They dropped me at the Vigeland Park,
where I toured about those gross statues for half an hour, then, using my nose,
walked back to Pension Rö, where I wrote a PC in Norske to Sid. Then to Björn Bakke’s place for an evening
meal. Björn in his slow way never stopped
talking, even when the TV was on or when we were playing chess. He won.
The meal was a wow – soup, mutton and assorted veg and potatoes, and
fruit salad, plus wine and coffee. A
formal meal, with candles lit on the table …
‘This morning moved out of my room, which
was a double, to a single, one floor up, then determined on a safari in the
rain up to the University, where the SSTS office is, and Oluf perhaps. NB.
Norwegians are fast drivers here, and the streets are narrow and
complicated by trams. English visitors
look out.
‘The University … is a mass of red-brick
buildings, muddy paths and excavations.
It took me 20 minutes to walk there, that is, nearly half way across the
city. Then there was the business of
finding the Reisekontor. No porter’s
lodge in the main building, so I had to ask in the office of the Chemistry
wing. There’s a new complex of
buildings over the road, which includes the travel bureau. Hand in my letter and get a reservation on
the 0645 plane from Oslo to London
on the 26th, which means I’ve got to come back to Oslo from Gothenburg. Fare for the plane is £13 – it’s a student
flight on a Fokker Friendship F7, which holds 44. It’s the last flight of the year … No Oluf. No one appears to have seen him over the
weekend …
‘Back
in the rain, and walk back to town, where I went on a hunt for a main Post
Office -- seems there are only two (you get stamps usually from a tobacconist)
– to buy some Norwegian stamps for Duncan. Bought my train ticket at the Station, where
I had a small lunch. In the Station
café I was sitting near two German dwarves in green Norwegian sweaters, with
their wives (?) who were normal height.
They were writing postcards. An
Englishman flourishing a Daily Express and not looking at anyone was also
nearby. It was quaint, surreal. I mean, how do I get to be sitting beside
two dwarves and an Englishman in Oslo Station on Monday 14 September 1964?
‘Returned to Pension Rö about 3.0 and
wrote letters about future movements and my return to England. Then out for another snack. Filled in time until 6.0 by learning some
Norwegian – very useful time-filler this.
Out into rain again, to foyer of Continental Hotel where I was to meet
Thane. He was late, having been to a
doctor about nose-bleeds. Had a drink
with him, in the Pavilion, while he narrated tales about Robert Shaw and Mary
Ure, and Alan Bates – how the latter and the others had gone on a “cruising”
spree in Vigeland
Park.
‘Still raining. Thought to go to the pictures, and located
the Sentrum cinema, which was showing a new version of The Killers. Bought seat ticket (3.50) then sat out the
intervening time till 9.0 in a large café.
Modern cinema, not too big, not too full either, lot of young people. No
smoking of course … Outside raining heavier.
Streets and pavements awash with overflow from the gutters … Splashed my
way back to the Pension, got very wet.
‘Tuesday, 15 September. Packed, paid up, had breakfast in café. Took a walk into the Castle Park
nearby. King not in residence, so
couldn’t say goodbye. Ordered taxi,
drove to Station, bought Daily Express.
At barrier am told that I must have a seat reservation, which is crazy
as train (five coaches) isn’t full.
This is the 12.35 Skandia express, going to Copenhagen, a Swedish train in fact. Meal in buffet (soup, coffee and egg and
anchovies on bread) costs me nine Norwegian kroner.
‘Weather gets windier and greyer as we
approach Sweden,
and we’re over the border, fir forests and lakes, without noticing it. Scandinavian railways are single-tracked. So there can’t be much traffic on them, and
no collisions. Only in stations do you
find more than one line.
‘Not particularly looking forward to being
in Sweden
again. Not particularly sorry to leave Oslo, but sorry to be leaving Norway. And in Gothenburg, with Rolf away most of
the day at school, I’m going to have a lot of spare time, and not much money
until the 26th. Must do a
lot of work on the MSS.’
On Friday, 18 September I sent a postcard
from Gothenburg to my mother, thanking her for sending me some money. I told her about my travel plans and said
that the weather was very grey and rainy and that Gothenburg was an industrial
town and sea-port and wasn’t very interesting.
My last postcard to her, dated 23 September, said I’d be leaving on
Friday the 25th, for Oslo, and would
get a flight back to London from Oslo at 8.0 am on the 26th. I ended with, ‘I’ll let you know when The
Redemption comes out when I get back.’
My ten days in Gothenburg were dealt with
in one entry in the Journal, written on 20 September.
‘It’s now Sunday (20th), and I
have done one full day’s work on the MSS.
Not as if I was having a crowded programme. But here there’s a piano to play, about a
thousand records, including scores of LPs, to listen to, and a library of
theatre and cinema books. I’ve only been out of the house twice. Last night (Saturday) and a trip into town
on Thursday to exchange my money and get some stamps for Duncan.
All Wednesday I used up by writing fairly long letters to Turid and Co,
and to Sjur. And there’s another thing
– the parents are away in Spain. The father’s a theatre, book and film critic,
and in the basement or cellar, there’s a tiny cinema with seats for eight, and
all the walls are papered with stills from hundreds of films. The father, and Rolf, have this pretty large
selection of films: nearly all the Chaplins, a good deal of Lloyd and Keaton,
and epics like Intolerance and Birth of a Nation, also Son of the Sheik and
early Errol Flynn, the first Tarzan, a lot of war films (documentaries)
also. Saw The Great Train Robbery, made
– it’s impossible – in 1903. And look
where the industry is now. Every evening various acquaintances tend to
gather here, as there are no inhibiting parents in this house. They come here to relax, play the piano,
make a musical noise and maybe see a film.
Something very hothouse about Swedish youth, fine skins and complexions,
and for the most part the girls are more dominant than the boys, more boyish in
fact, and wear darker colours.
‘Went to a dance with some of the group
last night and with Rolf and his 17(?)-year-old sister, who does the honours on
the cooking in the house. It was a
once-a-month Art School Hop, with a great beat group, though deafening, and a
Jazz Band. Entrance five kroner. Beer, cigarettes and Coco-Cola were on sale
in the hall, and a free smorgås on the table.
Saturday is definitely dance night.
Gothenburg is full of dance clubs, restaurants and halls. Outside the
places we passed coming into town were groups of young people waiting for a
general impulse, or gong, to go inside, and at one place there was a large
queue – they were actually queuing to get into a dance hall. During the Art School Hop, which finished at
12, there was an initiation ceremony for 35 first year students. They had to go
inside an Emmet-like construction of a wash-house. Their heads were stuck out of a hole, and
held, while their faces were slap-splashed by a large sponge shaped like a hand
which, on being jerked by a string, swung up out of a basin of water to slobber
water over them. Then the initiated were
expelled down a chute. A great deal of screaming and yelling and applause. Some strange dresses, quite a few beards, a
majority of Beatle haircuts, a lot of girlish shrieks during the dancing, and
promiscuous affection (not sex) off the floor, rubbing noses and arms around
shoulders. One poor girl, who had drunk too much, was publicly (from the mike)
told to leave the room lest she be sick there.
Quite a few people had left by 11.30.
It must be nice to be thoughtless and careless and young in Sweden amongst
so many attractive people of your own age.
Some girls were smoking a pipe or a cigar – they take the cancer threat
quite seriously here – as Rolf is now (smoking a pipe), it being his Sunday
morning smoke. Eva, his sister, is still
upstairs in bed. Now must do some work
on the MSS.
‘Friday, 25 September. On the train for Oslo.
Train left at 6.5 pm and will arrive at 11.25. It’s now 7.0 pm and almost dark outside. Feeling very woozy after too much burgundy
and punsch at last meal in the Asplund home.
The booze (and the chicken) I provided.
‘Trollhätten – and I check to see – having
moved from my reserved seat – whether the carriage I’m in goes to Oslo. It does.
Out on the platform a troll-type speaks to me in English, a small man
carrying a bag. “Does this train go to Oslo?” he asks, and then
lapses into Swedish. The only other
thing I gather is that he was in America in 1927. The conductor urges us onto the train, but
the troll doesn’t get on. I hope the
train does go to Oslo.
‘I’ve grown a beard, trimmed it today for
the first time, so that I’ll look like my photo on the back of The Redemption
by the time it’s published. The thought
of publication is strangely alarming. There I am, exposed irrevocably in print
… Thinks – here I am thinking ahead already.
The grand Scandinavian tour is really over, isn’t it? …
‘Arrived right on time, 11.25. Checked at Information where I might go for
the night. They suggested the Police
Station. They weren’t joking. So after leaving my cases in a locker, I
trekked off into the mild Norwegian night to assure myself of the whereabouts
of the bus terminal. Hordes of
unattached groups, almost entirely male, wandering in the avenue, much loud
discussion, but nobody was really drunk.
Went to the Police Station, which is the main Oslo one in Youngstorget, and enquired in
best English where I could stay for the night. They showed me a cell. Actually it was only a small high room off
the entrance hall with a seat along one wall.
Some writing on the wall, but mostly commiserating names and dates. On the floor was the bed for some reason,
well-used mattress, hospital pillows and sheets, and two grey blankets. The ceiling light stayed on all night. I copied out the MSS until 2.30 and then
dozed for about three hours. Not
unpleasant.
‘So it was that my last night in Norway was
spent in a police station. In the
morning I just wandered off to the railway station, where everything was still
shut and the cleaners at work. Sat
about, had a hot chocolate from a machine, smoked a cigarette, and felt like
one of the pillars of the station. Then
took a taxi, with my cases, to the terminal and so on out to Fornebu Airport. The plane left at 8 o’clock. Got rid of my last Norwegian kroner by buying
magazines and donating the odd øre to some charity box.
‘Now we’re somewhere over the North Sea, and there’s that fantastic panorama of cloud,
sea and sky all around. I’m seated by a
window, and the colours of the hazed out sun in the far distance are
beautiful. Certainly the angels must live
here. And I’m only six inches away from them. It’s Saturday, 26 September. Tomorrow
is my birthday. I’m 28. Will I
ever return to Scandinavia? And what did it all mean?’
Ultimately it didn’t add up to much and I
never visited Scandinavia again. The addresses of Björn, Rolf and Sjur
remained in my pocket diaries until 1970, but none of them was in the one for
1971. Tor and the girls never replied
to the letters I wrote. Björn visited
the UK once, but none of the
others, except for Sjur, who studied architecture at Nottingham University. Despite that I never saw him again.
As he had hoped, Björn became an actor,
performing with great success as a character actor in Sweden, on
stage and in films. In 2009 he was to
be seen in the Swedish film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as the policeman
Morell, and in 2010 he was in a George Clooney film, The American. Rolf Asplund became a successful
businessman in Gothenberg, and Wikipedia tells me that Sjur Linberg became a
partner in a firm of architects in Bermuda. He married an artist and sculptor there, Jo
Birdsey. My trip to Scandinavia
led to nothing lasting, unless one counts my first novel, Neither the Sea Nor
the Sand.
15. LONDON
and ITN, 1964-66
Nothing much changed over the next six months. I continued to lodge at 32 Eccleston Street, thanks to the
accommodating patience of Mrs Fradgley and the weekly hand-outs I continued to
receive at Chadwick Street. For the rest of the year, my pocket diary
is blank – no initials of people I met or anything I did – apart from notes
about the weather. Summertime ended on
25 October and clocks were put back an hour; the M1 was closed because of thick
fog on 1 November; the nights got darker earlier, and colder. It was during this period that I acted for
the last time on TV, in the aborted cartoon series filmed and directed by John
Duncan for Not So Much A Programme on BBC TV.
According to AD’s Memories I made a
day-trip to Bournemouth to see her in December and then spent Christmas with Marion and her family in Edinburgh rather than with my mother, who was
now 66. I imagine this was because it
would have been too stressful for us both, although I was still blindly unaware
how ill she was. Christmas Day was on a
Friday that year and I probably returned to London on the Monday. While at Broomhall, I would have slept on a
sofa-bed in the living-room.
My mother must have joined us for lunch,
for the obligatory roast turkey, plum pudding, the giving of presents and the
pulling of crackers, the reading of riddles and the wearing of paper hats, the
drinking of ginger wine. The unusual but fortuitously significant Christmas
present I gave my mother had already been installed. It
was a small TV set. The hiring of it may
have been made possible by a modest boost to my finances occasioned by the sale
of copies of The Redemption. The
monthly payments for the monochrome TV set weren’t very much, a few pounds, and
as she didn’t go out much in the winter and didn’t read anything, apart from
magazines, she only had the radio for company and entertainment. This, I knew from watching television at Mrs
Fradgley’s place, was what TV provided – as well as the news.
The BBC’s TV monopoly had been broken in
September 1955 by the launch of ITV, a consortium of regional companies and a
national news set-up called ITN. Then
in 1964 BBC TV split into BBC1 and BBC2.
So there were now three television channels. The TV set was installed by Rediffusion before
Christmas in my mother’s little front room, enabling her to watch the shows
specially staged at Christmas and New Year.
Later on, she would have watched the state funeral of Winston Churchill,
who had died on 24 January 1965. She
would have seen the service in St Paul’s, the sombre
processions and the huge crowds, not knowing that I was among the mass of
people in Whitehall. I had walked there from Eccleston Street.
Early in January I wrote to Eric Porter at
Stratford,
seeking his assistance and sponsorship with a writer’s grant I applied for from
the Arts Council, and asking if Peter Hall was likely to present an RSC version
of the miracle plays. Eric was
scheduled to play Shylock that season.
He replied, ‘I’ve only just heard about the Miracle Plays myself, and I
know no more than the fact that they are in the air … Whether or not this will
ever come off I don’t know – life changes so rapidly at the RST. But if he’s going to start with Genesis, and
finish with Amen, then a good title for it might be “The Bores of the
Moses”! I can’t promise to be able to
do anything about your idea of getting in on the Acts of the Apostles, but if
the subject crops up, I’ll mention your name.
For myself at the moment, I have just returned from posing as a nasty
Nazi in one of the more remote valleys of Norway, speaking in a thick German
accent which had a slight premonition of Shylock in it! Now I am thrusting myself into learning words,
words, words.’
The ‘nasty Nazi’ was in a well-made action
movie, The Heroes of Telemark, which starred Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris. I saw Eric in two other films, which were
released in 1964, The Fall of the Roman Empire
and The Pumpkin Eater. In the same year Paul Scofield was to be seen
as a Nazi colonel in The Train, and as Sir Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons
in 1966.
When I returned to London
from Edinburgh at the start of 1965 I persevered
with my writing of Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, and sent the revised version
off to Methuen. Geoffrey Strachan replied, on 16 March, ‘I
am afraid we did not feel that this one is one for us. It is in some ways quite effective as a
straight horror story … But in some ways we felt it was superficial.’ He suggested I send the MSS to Panther
Books, thanked me for giving Methuen
‘the first option’ on the book, and added a PS, ‘There’s no doubt it’s
excellent stuff for the cinema.’ It
might have been, if better made as a film by a company other than the one that
messed it up a few years later.
Copies of Neither the Sea and Moving On
were then sent in April to the publishers, Bodley Head, eliciting the deadening
response, ‘There were some passages in Neither the Sea Nor the Sand which were
quite well written and showed some promise.’
I
kept on trying to gain some sort of recognition as a writer, and in the first
three months of 1965 a copy of The Redemption winged its way to John Neville at
the Nottingham Playhouse without producing any positive reaction, and the play
agent, Margaret Ramsay, said she was unable to take me on. I wrote again to the National Theatre about
any acting jobs, and auditioned unsuccessfully in February for the Yvonne
Arnaud Theatre, which required the singing of a short unaccompanied song, an
excerpt from a poem by Milton, and a speech from a 19th century Russian
play. Laurier Lister, who was now the
artistic director there, replied (in April), ‘You gave a very good audition,
and the reason for this delay is that I was hoping to find something that might
be suitable for you … This, alas, in the event was not possible.’
Alas, so near and yet so far. And so it went on.
Nigel Noble, in New York now and working for a film
production company, excitedly wrote that the company was thinking of filming
Neither the Sea. But he fell out with
them and they with him and nothing happened there either.
My pocket diary for 1965 contains nothing
but comments about the weather. On 1
March there was ‘heavy snow all over the country. On 21 March the clocks went forward one
hour. I noted that on 25 March, after
three days of rain, the shops were selling masses of daffodils and tulips, and
that crocuses, hyacinths and pink cherry blossom were coming out. There was a heatwave right at the end of March,
and then, on Saturday 17 April ‘snow, rain, thunder gales, sleet over the
weekend, very cold.’ Lilacs and tulips
were out in the city squares by 10 May and four days later there was another
heatwave – ‘hottest day since August last’.
This coincided with ‘tidal waves in India.’
By this time Chadwick Street was threatening to stop
giving me any dole money as I didn’t seem to be making any effort about getting
a job, any job. And by this time my
continuing failure to be accepted as an author or as an actor was beginning to
get me down. It seemed that no one was
interested in what I wrote, or in me as an actor, or even in me as a
person. Friends, who had jobs and were
single or married, were almost as embarrassed as me about my lack of employment. They
were sympathetic but urged me to be realistic and settle down as they had
settled down. Why not get a job as an
English teacher, or do a postgraduate degree at a university? I
didn’t want to be a teacher. I didn’t
want to do an office job nor any job that meant working for five days every
week from 9 to 5. But what else was
there? What else could I do?
At some point I went to an agency,
Gabbitas and Thring, who found work for schoolteachers and tutors. Founded in 1873, they’d found jobs for HG
Wells, Evelyn Waugh, WH Auden, among other literary luminaries, and they sent
me off to be a tutor to a foreign boy living in a large Kensington flat. But I didn’t take to the boy or the
occupation and opted out. My only
option now seemed to be to change direction, to seek a new life elsewhere.
I must have read or heard on TV that Australia wanted people in Britain to
emigrate thither and would transport them thither by ship, on a one-way ticket,
for a payment of £10. There was a catch
– these ‘£10 Poms’ had to go wherever they were sent by the Australian
government and do whatever job they were given to do for two years, after which
they were on their own.
As it seemed by now – I was 28 – that I
had failed as a writer and as an actor, and in some obscure way as a person, I
began to think that if I was to be a total failure, as it seemed I was, I might
as well be one where no one knew me and where any aims and ambitions would
wither and die in the arid indifference of Australia. I would do as I was told to do and go where
I was sent, and if that meant being a teacher in the barren, god-forsaken
outback, then that’s what I would become.
So at the beginning of May I went to the
massive pile of Australia House, at the far end of the Aldwych, and inquired
about the conditions relating to a £10 passage to Australia. I was given the necessary forms and took
them back with me to Eccleston Street, where I studied them and tried to
reconcile myself with being a failure in that sun-burnt land. It seemed that I had no other choice but to
sign them, to append my name to the end of everything I knew -- and the
beginning of what?
And then, one weekend in Eccleston Street,
while slumped in Mrs Fradgley’s first floor lounge watching the early evening
and weekend TV news – she usually watched the BBC news – it occurred to me that
two of the persons reading the news on the other channel, ITV, had been at Oxford at the same time
as me. Sheridan Morley and Peter Snow
had both been in OUDS and ETC plays in which I had also acted – and there they
were, in the TV box in black and white, reading the national news. How did they come to be there? What qualified them for this particular and
peculiar occupation? They had both
acted at Oxford,
where both had got their degrees, and were thus no different from me. I could do what they were doing, I
thought. All they were doing was
reading aloud. I could do that as well
as they.
I
noticed that the company they were working for was called ITN, whatever and
wherever that was, and decided to put myself forward as suitable for employment
there, on the inadequate grounds that I had been employed by Radio Hong Kong
and the Scottish Home Service, had an Oxford degree in English and was a
part-time writer.
In order to find out where ITN was
situated, and what the initials meant, I looked up ITN (Independent Television
News) in the London
telephone directory and found it was in Television House, Kingsway, not a 100
yards away, as it turned out, from the Aldwych Theatre and Australia
House. I then had to find out the name
of the person to whom I should address my letter. So I got on a bus to the Aldwych and found
that Television House was the home of a London TV company, Rediffusion, as well
as of ATV, and that ITN was on the seventh floor. A lift took me up there and an attractive
coloured girl in Reception (she was from Barbados, where her father was the
senior judge) told me that the editor of ITN was called Geoffrey Cox. I should write to him. Back
in Eccleston Street
I did just that, typing my letter carefully and not at too great a length. Not difficult, as there wasn’t much to say
in the way of a CV. I only mentioned my
limited time with the RSC to prove that I had a reasonable voice and good
diction.
A few days later, much to my surprise at
the speed of the reply, a letter dated 13 May arrived from Independent
Television News, from Helen Gane, Secretary to the Editor. She said, ‘The Editor has asked me to
contact you and arrange a time for you to come in and see him. Perhaps you would be good enough to give me
a ring and we can then arrange a suitable date.’ I rang the Editor’s Secretary and agreed to
whatever day and time she suggested.
She informed me that I would be required to read a piece of news to a
camera and should wear a suit and tie.
13 May was a Thursday. Friday, 14 May was the ‘hottest day since
August last.’ On Monday the 17 May
there was a severe storm in the afternoon, with thunder, lightning and torrents
of rain. By the Wednesday it was cooler
and sunny again. Perhaps it was on the
Wednesday that I ventured back to Television House, soberly garbed in a dark
grey suit and wearing a Univ tie. The
girl at Reception, who introduced herself as Penny, was cheerful and told me
that before I saw the Editor I was to do what amounted to an audition.
Before long, one of the bulletin directors
appeared – the senior director, Bob Verrall – and he briskly led the way
upstairs to the floor above, where there was a cramped control room and a
windowless studio no bigger than Mrs Fradgley’s sitting-room, with a ceiling much
lower than hers and dark corners crowded with cables and lights. Two cameras on moveable stands pointed at a wide
plain desk, on which was a solitary telephone, and behind which was a swivel
chair, a backing flat painted pale blue and a low table on which were a mirror
and flat round blue tins marked Reggie and Andrew. I
parked myself in the chair and Verrall handed me a script of the previous night’s
headlines, a few pages typed on grey A4 paper.
The camera pointing at me had a boxed hood in front of the camera eye,
in which the teleprompter was set, but it wasn’t switched on and there was no
one to operate it. There was just me
and the cameraman in the studio.
Before Verrall disappeared into the
control room I asked him whether I should wear my glasses --- he thought I
shouldn’t. I had thought they might
make me look older and more serious.
Still thinking it might be useful to look older, I decided to comb my
hair straight back from my forehead. Up
to then I still had enough hair to be able to brush it sideways without it
looking too ridiculous. So I seized the
mirror and my comb, brushed my hair back, flattened it, straightened my tie,
and when a light on the desk turned green I began to read, looking at the
camera as much as I dared without losing my place in the few pages of the script.
This done, Verrall reappeared, said
‘That’s fine,’ or something like that and told me to return to Reception, where
some minutes later the Editor’s Secretary, Helen Gane, collected me and took me
along a corridor to the office of the Editor of ITN, Geoffrey Cox.
He sat behind a big desk at one end of the
room, whose windows looked out onto the upper floors of offices on the other
side of Kingsway. He was a small
compact man, and something about him -- perhaps it was the sleeked back hair –
reminded me of my father. Much later, I
saw from an old photo that, like my father, he had also been extremely
good-looking as a young man. I sat
nervously opposite him and he commented on my lack of journalistic and
television experience and the fact I’d been an actor. The TV news, he implied, had to be read
straightforwardly and not performed. I
stopped gesticulating and sat on my hands.
We both knew that all I had to recommend me was a mixed bag of some
radio work on a troopship, stints with Radio Hong Kong and the Scottish Home
Service, and an Oxford
degree.
I didn’t know at the time that he was 54,
that he’d been to Oriel College in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand,
that he had a son at Oxford, that he’d been a foreign correspondent before WW2
and was in Intelligence during the war, also that he’d become Editor of ITN in
May 1956. I was unaware that ITV had
gone on air in September 1955, and to begin with was only allowed to broadcast
20 minutes of news every day. ITN’s
first newscasters were Chris Chataway and Robin Day, and in May 1956 the
editorial staff numbered 19. Before
long Ludovic Kennedy replaced Chataway and among the reporters were George
Ffitch, Reginald Bosanquet and Lynne Reid-Banks, who was also an author and
wrote The L-shaped Room. When Day and
Kennedy joined the BBC, they were succeeded by Huw Thomas, Ian Trethowan and
Brian Connell, who in turn were replaced by Bosanquet and Andrew Gardner, who
joined ITN at the end of 1961. Peter
Snow was taken on, straight from Oxford,
in 1962.
There was another, free-lance, newscaster
at ITN at this time, Antony Brown, and when he suddenly left, early in 1965, a
replacement was suddenly needed. My
letter saved the Editor from the labour of ploughing through the many
applications and filmed auditions of potential newscasters, and so he took a
chance on me. And as with the RSC, my height
turned out to be an advantage.
In New Zealand, Geoffrey Cox had
played rugby, as a scrum-half, and it was said by jocular journalists in the
ITN newsroom that, being a small man, who was accustomed to having a tall
forward line to catch the ball and pass it on to him, he liked his newsreaders
to be tall. And indeed, quite a few journalists in the
newsroom were six feet and over, and both Peter Snow and Andrew Gardner were 6
feet 5. In fact, all the newcasters he
employed were six feet and more, except for Reginald Bosanquet, who was 5 feet
11. It was said in the newsroom that the
newscasters at ITN came by the yard, while those at the BBC came by the
pound. In fact all those at the BBC
were under six feet and some, like Richard Baker and Kenneth Kendall, were as
short as Geoffrey Cox.
I left his office that morning feeling
very discouraged, that I didn’t shape up and that I wasn’t made of the right
stuff. ITN was the last door on which I
would knock. My next and last
alternative was to pay my £10 passage to Australia, to disappear to the
other end of the world, to anonymity, to non-creative obscurity and some tedious,
humdrum job.
I couldn’t possibly know that I had a face
and a voice suitable for news-reading, especially the voice. I couldn’t hear myself, nor see myself in
any way other than as a face in a bathroom mirror. But I was comfortable in front of a camera
and felt I could read the news. After
all, that’s all it seemed to be – reading aloud to a camera. I could that. And so, most unusually for me – I hadn’t
done it before and didn’t do it ever again – that night I wrote another letter to Geoffrey Cox justifying my
appointment. The following morning I
posted it to ITN, thinking fatalistically – Australia, here I come.
Whether it influenced him (unlikely) or
whether a decision had already been made (more likely), I got a reply virtually
by return, probably on Monday, 24 May.
ITN offered to take me on straightaway as a trainee sub-editor,
script-writer and newsreader on a three-month trial. I would be paid £25 a week. Was that acceptable? Was it
acceptable? Wow!
I said goodbye to Chadwick Street, signing on just one more
time, and joined ITN on Monday, 31 May, 1965.
Two weeks later I was reading the national
news.
No one could quite believe it. Nor could I. My friends were pleased, Mrs Fradgley was
pleased, and when I visited AD at the Anglo-Swiss Hotel, she was relieved and
more than pleased -- as was my mother.
AD wrote in her Memories, ‘One day in May Gordon came to spend the day
with me. By this time I was becoming
increasingly worried about his future.
He had not been successful in finding any sort of work that would interest
him, and was equally determined to wait until something suitable turned
up. He had even considered emigrating
to Australia,
to try his luck there. It was,
therefore, with a tremendous sigh of relief that on this particular day he had
some good news for me. Gordon had
sought an interview with Independent Television News (ITN), had been given an
audition, and had been taken on as a newscaster for a three months’ trial
period. Work was to start
forthwith. This was a tremendous relief
to me and I knew that his mother would be jubilant.’
My first day at ITN was quite daunting, as
were the ensuing weeks and months. I
never felt completely at home at ITN, as I did with the RSC, though I always
felt comfortable about the actual reading of the news and the apparently
strange business of talking to a camera.
From the beginning I read the
news as if I was talking, not to the camera, but to someone I knew.
On Monday, 31 May, I turned up at ITN at
2.0 pm wearing a suit and tie and with my hair brushed back from my
forehead. From now on this became my
ITN image.
The Deputy Editor, David Nicholas, a
bespectacled, soft-spoken Welshman, led me from Reception down a long corridor
with offices on either side to a large bright room, the newsroom, inhabited by
groups of desks and a mix of people, mostly female PAs and secretaries and some
newsmen, who were on the phone, or reading newspapers or typing or ambling up
and down between the desks. I was
introduced to the chief sub-editor in a polite but cursory way and he indicated
where, as a sub-editor, I should sit.
Other subs, who were all in their twenties and younger than me, smiled
and nodded. Some bothered to introduce
themselves. I noticed they were
two-finger typists like me.
Being among total strangers, conversing
with them, working with them, was like being back at school. The trouble was that I was the only new
boy. They all knew what they were doing
and I didn’t. They were helpful, but
some of the older ex-Fleet Street journalists working in the newsroom, not
surprisingly and not without cause, viewed me with suspicion and some
doubt. Not only did I have to learn
about how the news was prepared, about sub-editing and script-writing, I also
had to be instructed in the technicalities of news-reading. One day I was the lowest of the low (a
sub-editor) and the next I was being groomed as a front man for ITN (a
newsreader).
To that end I went upstairs a few times to
do some dummy run-throughs of the main bulletin. This meant getting used to the teleprompter,
which a designated PA typist seated to the right of the newsreader unwound from
a long roll, about six inches wide, of stories stuck together, top to
tail. These magically appeared, as she
unrolled them, in the hooded box in front of the camera eye. As she did so, they were reflected onto a
tilted mirror through which the camera peered, framing the head and shoulders
of the newsreader. This was usually a
mid-shot, but was varied by whoever was directing, when the cameraman moved
into a close-up or widened the shot to take in the desk.
On the desk was a telephone, the numbered
stories and a few spares. Below the
desk was a small table, on which were arrayed a mirror on a stand, a brush and
comb, some round blue tins of powder puff make-up, and a plastic cup of water
if required. The powder puffs, each tin
being labelled with a newscaster’s name, were self-applied to reduce the
shininess of sweaty foreheads and noses.
This was done with the help of the mirror, used also to help in the
straightening of ties and the smoothing of hair.
Apart from the cameraman and the PA
operating the teleprompter, the only other person in the studio was the floor
manager, who supervised and controlled proceedings there. He or
she (it was mostly a senior female PA) acted as a go-between, between the
bulletin director in the control room and the newsreader, whom she cued before
each story and to whom she conveyed information. She had an ear-piece – initially I didn’t –
and passed on instructions from the director whenever a film was shown and we
were off-air, which allowed her to speak to me. If a sudden change in a story arose while I
was speaking, she would signal ‘Cut!’ or ‘Stop there!’ with an appropriate
gesture, and the count-down into a filmed report would be indicated by her
right arm extended by the camera, within my eye-line, while she bent her
fingers, one by one, in time with the control room PA’s count – Five, four
three, two, one. A filmed report didn’t
have to be counted out as the last words of the film were given on the
script. Nonetheless, the PA always cued
the next story with a pointed finger attached to a sweeping downward gesture. The stories were usually read in the order
in which they were numbered, except when they were cut or a new story
inserted. In this case the PA would
hold up a piece of paper on which she had scrawled -- ‘Cut 7.’ Or, alarmingly, at the end of a spoken
paragraph she might make a hand gesture as if cutting her throat -- which meant
‘Stop there.’
This might happen because the control-room
PA, who was back-timing the bulletin, had mistimed a story or even the
running-time of the whole bulletin, which had to be timed to the second, as the
ITV regional companies took over on the dot from the ITN News at precise,
on-the-second times.
The start and end of the main bulletin was
marked by ITN’s signature tune, a piece of rather jolly upbeat music called Non
Stop, written by a Wimbledon solicitor, John Batt, and based on a tone poem he
had written while still at school. In
his book about ITN, See It Happen, Geoffrey Cox somewhat fulsomely said of the
tune, ‘It struck exactly the right note for those pioneering days, with its
lack of pomp and pretension, with its implication that something exciting and
yet significant was about to be reported … (It expressed) the jaunty
confidence, not only of a news medium, but of a country at last emerging from
war and austerity.’
Meanwhile, down in the newsroom, I was
being given the task of sub-editing a few news items on agency tapes – which
meant reducing the content to two or three short paragraphs. The chief sub would dump or chuck a piece of
paper on my desk, or several pieces paper-clipped together, and say, ‘Do me 20
seconds on that’ or ‘Do me a spare.’ I
would cast aside the afternoon edition of the Evening Standard or The Times
crossword and concentrate for five minutes or so on producing a peerless piece
of factual, incisive prose, which I then proudly handed over to the
chief-sub. Whatever I wrote would be
edited, emended, corrected and occasionally given back to me to be rewritten,
after which it was typed by one of the PAs.
There was no training as such at ITN. I was never trained to sub-edit stories, or
to read the news. I learned by doing,
by watching how things were done and, when I asked, by having things
explained. I had never been trained at
anything, at the business of acting, or of reading the news, or of writing
novels and plays.
All the news items were known as stories,
and if a story was unlikely to be used in the bulletin it wasn’t given a number
and was marked as a spare. The
chief-sub and the output editor, who was in effect the producer of the news
programme, checked the writing and content of all the stories, as did, to a
lesser degree, the bulletin director and the newsreader. These four sat together in a block of four
separate desks pushed together. Nearby
were the PAs who typed the stories and any rewrites, as well as the
teleprompter roll, which was made up of strips of stories, stuck together and
numbered as they were in the bulletin.
Other desks were occupied by the Home News
editor, the Foreign News editor and their secretaries, and by the reporters,
including those who had more defined roles as political correspondent, foreign
correspondent, science correspondent, sport or crime correspondent. None of those who appeared in vision on the
news were women, although a woman, Barbara Mandell, had read the news in the
early days of ITN. She now voiced
‘soft’ stories on film that dealt with the royal family, fashion and animals,
while sitting in a cubicle adjacent to the control room. Bob Bateman voiced football results and some
sports stories. Whoever wrote the
script for these filmed stories stood behind the reader and tapped him or her
on the shoulder when a change of shot had to be cued.
Lynne Reid Banks preceded me at ITN. Another author, she wrote, in all, 40
books. She’d also been an actress. A sub-editor, she became television’s first
female reporter, but is better known as the author of The L-Shaped Room. The story, adapted by Bryan Forbes, who had
admired Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, was turned into a controversial film in
1962, starring Leslie Caron, my erstwhile dancing partner. Other authors who were at ITN included
Gerald Seymour and Peter Driscoll.
I was instrumental in launching Gerald
Seymour as the author of a series of best-selling novels. One afternoon he took me to one side in the
newsroom and said he had written a novel and could I advise him about any
publisher who might be interested in looking at it. I suggested that he should send it to my
agent, Michael Sissons at AD Peters. A
week later a crate of champagne, with thanks, was delivered to my doorstep in
Primrose Hill. Sissons had not only got
Collins to publish the book, Harry’s Game, but also an American publisher. Its appearance in 1975 launched Seymour on a very
lucrative and successful literary career.
Reginald Bosanquet, who was the senior newsreader, never read the
headlines nor the weekend news.
Instead, he presented a short news magazine programme, called Dateline,
which was transmitted late at night from Monday to Thursday, but not on a
regular basis, if at all, by the ITV regional companies. When he read the news at 5.55, the
headlines that night were read by Sheridan Morley or a reporter, Richard
Lindley. These two also read the
headlines, known as the lunchbox, which were transmitted every Sunday about
1230.
I never knew or realised at the time that
Reggie wore a toupee. It must have been
a very good one to look so real. But in
later years it occasionally seemed to be somewhat carelessly attached. He was what is called a bon viveur and was
also a womaniser. He was intelligent,
charming and good at his job, but also lazy, pleasure-loving and self-indulgent. Once, in the 70s, when the newscasters’
secretary was moaning about the meaning of life and the state of the world she
said, ‘I don’t know where I’m going.’
Reggie retorted, ‘I know where I’m going. Down hill.’
In addition to Dateline, ITN also put out
a weekly half-hour programme that concentrated on some current issue. This was ITN Reports, and it was presented
by Andrew Gardner. It had previously
been known as Roving Report, and then became Reporting 1966, etc. By 1965
ITN had succeeded in squeezing more than the original 20 minutes of daily
air-time permitted by the ITV companies.
When I arrived at ITN, the chief
newscasters were Bosanquet, Andrew Gardner and Peter Snow, and the main
reporters were Sandy Gall, John Edwards, Alan Hart, Richard Lindley, Michael
Nicholson and Gerald Seymour. Although
I thought of myself as a newsreader, having been employed as such in Hong Kong
and Glasgow,
that was a job description used by the BBC.
ITN had been calling its front men ‘newscasters’ since it began. This was to emphasise the difference between
those at the BBC who merely read the news, and those at ITN, who as ‘television
journalists’ were involved in the writing and even the content of the news.
The 5.55 bulletin, which had initially
been transmitted at 8.55, consisted of about a dozen stories, backed up by four
or five spares, which were to be used as fillers if the programme underran for
some reason or a filmed story broke down.
The filmed stories were written by script-writers, whose introductions
led into a film and to which a postscript was sometimes added. If there was Sound on Film (SOF), as when
someone was interviewed, some cues might be included. Most stories were illustrated with stills
of the persons being named, or agency stills of an overseas disaster and stills
from ITN’s Library. Simple maps of
British or other locations were provided by the Graphics department. And of course everything was in black and
white.
What was so pleasing about being employed
at ITN was that I didn’t need to be there until about 2.0 pm, as the main
bulletin, as it was called, wasn’t transmitted until 5.55 pm. The newsreader who read this 11-minute
bulletin also read the headlines, which went out about 10.30 pm or later. There were two bulletins on a Saturday and
two on the Sunday, the lunchbox on the Sunday being -- where else? -- at
lunchtime. Some of the ITV companies
recorded the late night headlines and transmitted them when it suited their
programme schedules as late as 11.15, or didn’t transmit them at all.
Another good thing about the news was that
there were no recriminations afterwards if mistakes were made and something
went wrong. Everyone did their best,
and every day was a new beginning, with new news, and new matters and personnel
to deal with. It was never dull. It was like preparing for a First Night
every night.
Nobody in the newsroom was much older than
40. Most were in their 20s. There were two main output editors (David
Phillips and Steve Wright); two chief-subs (Derek Murray and Jon Lander); and
four bulletin directors (Bob Verrall, Ron Fouracre, Michael Piper and Diana
Edwards-Jones). Diana was short, plump
and Welsh, nicknamed Erogenous Jones, and in the control room she was a lavish
and lyrical user of four-letter words when cueing the newscaster, telecine,
maps and stills. She enjoyed a drink,
as did most of the senior journalists, who used to assemble in a local pub, the
White Horse, at lunch-time, as well as after the 5.55. They also ate and drank at local Greek or
Italian restaurants, where they were sometimes joined by a couple of PAs, by
the Home or Foreign News Editor, and by the occasional reporter. A copy-taster always remained in the
newsroom. He sorted out the agency (Reuters
and the Press Association) sources of news, the stories and pictures, which
constantly clattered out of teleprinter machines. He also answered any urgent phone-calls
concerning a plane crash or other disaster, or the death of some notable
person.
One day a copy-taster became so vexed with
someone in the newsroom that he threw a wire tray containing a heap of agency
stories out of the open window behind him and into the rear well of Rediffusion
House. Temperamental displays were very
few, however. Humour, high jinks and
energy characterised the newsroom in those days.
Being a junior newscaster I associated
socially with the junior reporters and subs, and as I was so near the Aldwych
Theatre and the Opera Tavern I used to meet up with some of the junior members
of the RSC for a drink or a meal, apart from those chums from Univ who were now
in London. I didn’t socialise with the newscasters, not
even with Peter Snow and Sheridan Morley.
I was as yet not one of them, being an apprentice in every way, learning
the ropes, and only at ITN on a three-month trial.
At
lunchtimes or after the 5.55 I sometimes went downstairs with one or two of the
subs or with the Foreign Desk secretary, Jane Taylor, for a meal in the
Rediffusion canteen. Usually we left
the building for a cheap meal at some café or a Wimpy Bar, or boldly invaded
the vast buffet restaurant in the basement of Bush House, from where BBC
Radio’s World Service was based.
Richard Whiteley, who at the age of 21 joined ITN on 5 July as an
editorial trainee, straight from Cambridge University, recalled somewhat
swooningly in his autobiography, Himoff!, ie, Him Off The Telly, that he and I used
to eat at another venue.
He wrote, ‘Gordon Honeycombe was my first
famous pal … He was an Oxford
man, but an actor by inclination and not a journalist. Geoffrey Cox took him on, doubtless for his
excellent diction and his unique appearance.
He was balding before the days when Clive James made hair-loss sexy … On
days when he wasn’t newscasting, Gordon did shifts on the subs’ desks, like we
other back- room boys. Although he was
by far the most famous TV star I had ever met, he was engagingly modest and
unassuming … The late shift at the weekend was a bit of a thrill. With the canteen closed, we were forced to
make our own feeding arrangements. This
meant a trip … to the exotic Lancaster Grill, which nestled on the left-hand
side of Waterloo Bridge.
Gordon, as the weekend newscaster, would sportingly come along. I was very impressed that this great man
would choose to have chicken and chips with us … And so it was with no little
excitement I eagerly plodded along beside him as we made our way to the
Grill. Although resplendent in hat,
thereby disguising his trademark pate, and glasses which he never wore on TV,
muffler and green great coat, looking more like Sherlock Holmes than the news
icon that he surely was, he could not disguise his height. I
experienced vicarious pleasure by walking in the company of a great man who was
not recognised, so that I was the only person who knew who he was.’
Richard suffered from various insecurities and
was so eager to please, almost obsequious, that he wore a permanent nervous
smile and beamed at everyone through his glasses. After three years he left ITN for Yorkshire
TV, where he eventually presented YTV’s magazine programme, Calendar, and
became nationally known as the cheery, tittering host of Countdown, uttering
awful puns and wearing garish gear. He
presented Countdown for 23 years and died in June 2005.
Also at ITN at this time was another sub-editor,
Peter Sissons, aged 23, who’d been at Univ, like me, and went on to achieve
even greater renown with the BBC, as the presenter of Question Time and the
Nine O’clock News. Peter and his wife,
Sylvia, introduced me to brass-rubbing, which became a hobby of mine for many
years. It was through him that I met
Paul McCartney, with whom Peter had been at school in Liverpool. But that, again, is another story.
In those first three months at ITN,
hundreds of miners were killed in colliery disasters in Japan and Yugoslavia;
Sir Alec Douglas-Home resigned as the leader of the Conservatives and was
replaced by Edward Heath (Harold Wilson was Prime Minister); cigarette
advertising on television was banned; Singapore seceded from Malaysia; and there
were race riots in Los Angeles. Unless
news stories had some British interest or involved British persons, or could be
illustrated by agency stills or even by film from a foreign source, they were
unlikely to feature in the TV News. I
imagine the colliery disasters in Japan
and Yugoslavia
were illustrated by agency stills and a simple map, or ended up as spares.
Then on Friday, 21 October 1966 a disaster
at home tested ITN’s reporters and news-gathering capabilities to the limit –
Aberfan.
After days of heavy rain a colliery waste
tip looming over the Welsh village
of Aberfan collapsed,
sending a liquefied avalanche of sludge and rock, 12 metres deep, plunging down
onto the village, engulfing a farm, terraced houses and a primary school. 116 children and 28 adults died. I wasn’t on duty that day. But that night Peter Snow was reading the
news and a male student promoting a rag week chose the very worst time to make
an unscheduled appearance on air. He
got into the studio and was glimpsed behind Peter, gesticulating, before the
control room rapidly cut to a still or a map.
David Nicholas, who was in the control room, rushed into the studio,
seized the student, dragged him out and allegedly thumped him several
times. David was Welsh and the tragedy
of Aberfan affected him more than most, I imagine, at ITN, and as Deputy Editor
he was concerned about the smooth-running and reputation of the news.
Any
major disaster at home would have been announced, as soon as it was verified,
by a newsflash from ITN. This was
always exciting, as it was very new news and had to be got on air before the
BBC did so. This meant getting the ITV
companies to interrupt all their schedules and give ITN an extra minute or 30
seconds of their air-time. From a news
point of view bad news was good news, and very bad news was great news -- and
great viewing if you had pictures as well.
The worst disaster I ever had to announce, initially in a newsflash, was
also the worst disaster in aviation history.
It was Sunday, 27 March 1977 and the news
team had assembled in the Green Room of ITN House at lunchtime for a drink
after putting out the Early News.
Suddenly the copy-taster burst into the room waving a piece of
paper. All it said at the time was that
two jumbo jets had collided at an airport on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands and that many were feared to have
died. ‘Great!’ exclaimed the output
editor, and we all sped upstairs to the newsroom. Over the next few hours, during which we
broadcast more than one newsflash, the story built up. Eventually we had agency stills of the
wreckage. A KLM 747 had been taking
off in foggy, dull conditions, when its undercarriage clipped the top of a Pan
Am 747 taxiing on the runway towards it.
The KLM 747 crashed in flames – everyone on board was killed. In all 583 people died.
I never liked it when we showed pictures
of people about to die, as when we showed a film of a Japanese passenger jet
spiralling to the ground and crashing near Mt Fuji, and a motor-racing car in
flames on a race-track, the driver trapped inside. Nowadays news organisations capitalise on
sensational stories and pictures, taking a shameful delight in showing violence
and the results of violence – gross close-up pictures of bruised and bloody
faces, blood on a pavement, and fatal accidents and disasters of every sort,
showing them not once but several times and often in slow motion. To me, this is and was deplorable.
At ITN in 1966 any minor newsworthy event
that occurred far from London – even in Scotland or Wales -- was unlikely to make the
news. A reporter had to get to the scene of the
incident and then send his filmed report back to ITN by train or plane. He could telephone a report, but television
was a visual medium and it was much more effective and preferred if ITN’s
reporter was seen rather than heard.
BBC TV, with radio stations and contacts around the world, could cover
most foreign stories by phoned reports.
But ITN in those days had only two reporters overseas, one based in New York and the other in Rome,
to cover, respectively, the USA,
Europe and the Middle East. The rest of the world was virtually ignored
– unless a reporter was sent at enormous expense to cover a running story, a
story that was continuing to make the news.
What was news generally depended at ITN on what Fleet Street decided was
news that day, and whatever newspaper items BBC Radio and BBC TV chose to
follow up.
And then, two weeks after joining ITN, I
made the news.
One morning Andrew Gardner phoned in to say
that he was ill, and for some reason neither Reggie Bosanquet nor Peter Snow
was available to stand in for him. So
when I arrived after lunch to resume my pedestrian duties as a sub-editor, I
was told I would be reading the news at 5.55.
All of a sudden I was sitting in the newscaster’s chair in the newsroom,
sharing the power-house block of desks with the output editor, the chief-sub
and the director. All of a sudden I was
no longer writing spares, but editing lead stories and others that were
actually going to be used in the bulletin.
I was privy to discussions about content, timing, films, maps and stills
and the order of the stories, and when we all went upstairs to the studio to
rehearse, it was for real.
I was mainly concerned that all the stories on
the teleprompter tallied with the scripted stories, and that I could see the
words, without wearing my glasses, as they unrolled in the mirror in front of
the camera’s eye. As the mirror was
about six inches wide, and only showed about five lines of script at a time, I
needed to have the camera positioned about seven feet away, so that I could
easily read the teleprompter’s stories as they unrolled. But rather than fixedly read from the
teleprompter all the time, I thought it more natural to look down now and then
at the scripted stories, to read from them if figures like trade deficits were
being quoted or the pronouncements of some politician. And when I finished with a story I paused
briefly to turn it over and pick up another.
I thought I should be seen to be reading the news, from scripts I had on
the desk. No one does that now.
Nothing untoward happened that I remember
during the broadcast. Having been thrown
in at the deep end, I managed to swim without too much splashing to the other
end of the pool. Afterwards, I probably
joined my younger newsroom colleagues for a celebratory drink in a local pub.
The following day, Andrew was still off
ill, and again I was told to fill in for him.
But this time – disaster!
We
were upstairs in the studio and the control room was working through the
running order, checking the in-and-out cues on films, maps, stills, and the
timing of each story. I was reading
through the stories on the teleprompter and marking certain words or passages
on the scripts for emphasis. Suddenly
the floor manger, Pat Harris, stopped whatever she was doing and put a hand to
the ear-piece in her ear. She looked
startled. She said, ‘There’s a fire in
telecine.’ The teleprompter girl and
I, and the cameraman, stared at her. I
thought that if there was a fire – and telecine was on the same floor as the
studio -- we would all have to vacate the building and there would be no news
at 5.55 from ITN.
A minute or so passed as Pat Harris
listened and I apprehensively looked at her for guidance. Eventually she said that the fire had been
extinguished but that all the machines in telecine were unusable. With no film, the bulletin would barely last
five minutes, even if the few spares were read. What was I to do? Then she said that the cans of film
containing the bulletin stories were being rushed to Rediffusion’s telecine
facility several floors below. Her next
instruction to me was to lay all the scripted stories, from 1 to 12, in order
along the front of the desk, and because the films being set up in Rediffusion
would be out of sequence, she would indicate which story I should read by
pushing it towards me. Vision lines
between Rediffusion and ITN had to be opened and established, and it wasn’t
until ITN’s opening music was being played, that all the films, though jumbled
up, were ready for transmission.
I began with the scheduled story, Number
1, but from then on read whatever Pat Harris, crouching on the other side of
the desk, out of sight of the camera eye, pushed towards me. The teleprompter girl rapidly wound her roll
of the news forwards or back, trying to keep up with the out-of-order stories I
was reading. Whenever a filmed story
was being shown, Pat was able to speak to me and advise me as to what was
next. During all this I became aware
of a smell of burning, and fully expected that there’d be a cry of ‘Fire!’ and
that we would all have to flee.
Although there were more pauses than usual
as I adjusted the stories and settled into what I’d be reading next, the
bulletin proceeded comparatively smoothly, culminating in the concluding
triumphal music of Non Stop – at which point we all became slightly hysterical
with relief and the release of tension.
The director ran in shouting, ‘Well done!’
When I tottered down the stairs to the
newsroom, everyone there was on their feet.
They’d been watching the 5.55 on the newsroom monitors, and when I
appeared they all applauded. That
doesn’t happen very often in a newsroom.
Congratulatory and celebratory drinks were then downed by everyone,
apart from the copy-taster, in the White Horse.
This episode was briefly reported in the
national and regional papers the following day – ‘Fire, but TV news bulletin
goes on’ – ‘Studio blaze, but TV news carries on’ – ‘Mr Honeycombe, aged 27,
was making his second appearance in a main news bulletin,’ etc.
ITN had put out a story for the agencies
at 7.58 pm the preceding night, under the heading ‘ITN fire affects film
projectors.’ It said, ‘Fifteen minutes
before Independent TV News’ 5.55 pm bulletin went on air tonight a fire made
all the company’s film projectors unusable.
Flames four feet high shot out from an electrical switchboard on the
eighth floor of Television House, Kingsway.
The fire was put out by ITN’s own staff … The bulletin was completely
re-organised and arrangements were made to send ITN’s film to Rediffusion’s
projectors in the same block … An ITN spokesman said, “It was one of the worst
crises we’ve had in the ten years of ITN’s history. But Honeycombe rose to the occasion well and
nobody noticed anything unusual about the bulletin.” ’
I had been blooded and had accidentally
proved my worth. I had read the news in
trying circumstances and kept my cool. And
so it happened some weeks before the end of my three-month trial that I was
offered an open-ended contract as a newscaster with ITN. As such, from 1 September, I would be paid
12½ guineas a day.
This was increased by the next Editor of
ITN, Nigel Ryan, five years later, on 12 October 1971, when my salary went up
from £21 to £23 per weekday, and from £26.25 to £30 for weekend days. This was a lot, but the older and more
experienced newscasters and senior reporters were receiving, I believe, almost
double what I was being paid.
In the meantime I had left Eccleston Street,
taking a risk that my first three months at ITN would result in me being permanently
employed there. I said goodbye to Mrs
Fradgley and moved into a rented flat on the southern side of the Thames, in
Battersea, into 79A Prince of Wales Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, which was a long
road of assorted four-storey mansion blocks stretching along the tree-lined
southern edge of Battersea
Park.
The one-bedroom second floor flat, with a
separate living-room, kitchen and bathroom, and a northerly outlook over the
park, belonged to Michael Williams. He
had joined the RSC in 1963 and had been in The Beggar’s Opera and The
Representative (as Eichmann) at the Aldwych Theatre, after which he played Puck
in The Dream and alternated between RSC productions in Stratford
and London. He became friendly with Judi Dench and they
married in 1971. I must have been having a drink with some RSC
actors in the Opera Tavern soon after I joined ITN when I heard that Michael
wanted someone to rent his Battersea flat while he was at Stratford.
A deal was quickly struck and I moved into Prince of Wales Drive in June or early
July.
Ian Richardson and his wife, Maroussia,
also lived in the Drive, in a flat in Cyril Mansions. Years earlier, in 1908, the family of Noel
Coward had moved into a top-floor flat at 70 Prince of Wales Mansions when he
was seven. They were there until 1913,
by which time he had already appeared in minor roles in four plays, including
Peter Pan (as Slightly).
For the first time in my life I had to
become accustomed to being in a home of my own, and on my own, and in making
the most basic meals for myself, in washing and tidying up, in seeing to the
laundry, putting out the rubbish and cleaning the flat. I hadn’t been in 79A for more than a few
weeks when I received a letter from my mother, posted on Saturday, 24
July. It would be the last letter she
would write to me. She had been
hospitalised in June and was in a ward at the Deaconess
Hospital in Edinburgh.
She had begun writing the letter, as she
noted at the top of the first page, at 5.25 on the Saturday morning. Her handwriting now had less of the
pronounced backwards sloping letters that characterised what she wrote, and was
now more uneven and widely spaced. It
was topped by – ‘PS. Letter received
this am. Very many thanks, M.’ My letter would have spoken about my first
six weeks at ITN, and about my first appearances reading the news. By the middle of July I was probably reading
the occasional Headlines, instead of Sheridan Morley, as well as the bulletins
on Saturdays and Sundays, while continuing to sub-edit and script-write stories
for the news.
She wrote, ‘Hullo Darling. Just to let you know I am seeing you on the
News on Television! All the nurses
& sisters come running into the room to see you & confer amongst themselves
& the young girl patients go to the ends of their beds. You are doing very well, just like an
experienced announcer & I am quite thrilled when I think of the few years
you have been looking for a suitable job.
Is it very hard work? Needs a lot of concentration but it must be
interesting & specially being someone of importance all at once. Jean Nicoll wrote me and enjoys seeing
you. She sent me flowers.
‘I am fine & arm improving. Get good food & attention.
‘Mrs McCallan has had another grandchild
ten wee girls. Three lovely sunny days
last week but foggy & cold now & had a thunderstorm the other day. Been an awful July! Let’s hope August will be okay. Hope you have a solid waterproof & keep
coat for Winter. Plastic ones not much good. I have a lovely blue waterproof cape. I always wear a cape & skirt now – suits
me.
‘My wig is coming here to Hosp.
‘Much love to you. Let me know if you need anything else. Yr loving Mum.’
I don’t recall that she ever called me
‘darling’ – not in her letters anyway, which always began, ‘Dear Ronald.’ Jean Nicoll was Bill Nicoll’s mother. They must have kept in touch after Bill and
I left the Academy ten years ago. In my
letter, I must have asked about my mother’s swollen arm, which she inevitably
reassured me, and herself, was ‘improving.’
I had no idea she was wearing, or about to wear, a wig. I wondered what colour it was. Surely not black? I was glad and gratified to hear that she
had seen me read the news, not only at home in Craiglockhart Road, but also in the
hospital.
Her letter would have reached me on
Monday, 26 July. The rest of the week
was spent by me at ITN.
On the Friday morning, at home in
Battersea, I got a telephone call from my sister. She was calling from Edinburgh.
She was in tears. ‘Oh, Ronald,’
she wailed. ‘Mum’s very ill. I think you ought to come and see her before
… As soon as you can.’ She was ringing
from a neighbours’ house – the Campbells’
home in Broomhall didn’t have a telephone.
I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that my mother was
dying. Mothers didn’t die. I knew she was ill, but she wasn’t that ill
– no one had said so -- and in her letter she’d said that her arm was
improving. I phoned ITN and said I had
to go to Edinburgh
– my mother was in hospital – I’d let ITN know when I was coming back, possibly
on the Monday. I stuffed a few items
into a hold-all and got a taxi to King’s Cross Station. As I knew from my frequent trips north, trains
to Edinburgh
left every hour or so. I would just get
the next one.
It
was a gloomy journey. I sat like a
stone, incapable of reading the newspapers I’d bought and gazing out of the
window at the passing countryside and towns, which were overlaid by random images
of past events and other places, of India, of Edinburgh, and of all the places
where we’d lived.
My sister wasn’t at Waverley Station to
meet me – her husband, Jim, was at work, and she had her two small daughters to
care for and worry about. I got a taxi
to the Pleasance, a wide road not far from the station that led north into the
Cowgate and the Royal Mile. To the east
the basalt cliffs of Salisbury Crags reared up, guarding the higher slopes of
Arthur’s Seat. The Deaconess Hospital
was an old grey-stone building. The
interior wasn’t well lit and smelt of some disinfectant. I was led up to a ward on the second floor,
where all the women in their beds stared at me as if I were something from
outer space.
My mother was in a doorless side room,
part of the ward. She lay motionless on
her back in a narrow bed, looking smaller, thinner, older. Her face, without make-up, was pale and
gaunt and her hair was scanty and grey.
As soon as she recognised me she said, in a thin, high voice, ‘Oh dear,
I must be ill.’ Seen on the TV set in
the ward my image had delighted her.
Now, with me standing by her bed, in person, she despaired.
I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, almost speechless, filling
the silence with feeble platitudes, words of comfort and bits of information
about London,
about my new abode and ITN. She said
very little and didn’t move, responding with an effort and speaking in a
strangely thin high voice, that of a little girl. Through a window at the foot of her bed, the
escarpment of Salisbury Crags peered in, their bare teeth fixed in a grimace.
A
nursing sister appeared, saying that my mother needed some kind of medical
attention and I left the building, saying I’d be back in half an hour, and on
walking down a small side street found myself on the edge of Holyrood Park,
with the grand panorama of Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat before me. For a while I sat on a bench, my mind a
blank, and looked at people passing by, living their lives, distantly, as if
they were travellers from another time.
Returning to the hospital I bought a bunch of flowers at a greengrocer’s
shop and went up to see my mother.
She seemed unchanged. ‘Very nice,’ she said in her high thin voice
when I showed her the flowers and put them on a table. I didn’t touch her, I couldn’t touch
her. She was a stranger, someone other
than the mother I had known. And she
didn’t want to see me there, to see her looking so old and ill.
A nurse rescued me, saying it was time for
me to go. ‘Bye-bye,’ I said. ‘Sleep well. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ My mother made no reply. But she slept more than well, and I saw her
the following day.
That night I slept on the sofa-bed in the
living-room of the Campbell
home in Broomhall. In the morning,
when Jim was out in the car with the girls – it was Saturday and they had gone
to a Library and also to do some shopping, a neighbour appeared. The hospital had rung her. She told us that our mother had died. My sister broke down. I went outside to get some air. I saw the estate as if through glass, as if
it was another world.
We had to wait until Jim returned with the
girls before we were able to drive to the Deaconess Hospital. By then it was about 12.30. The girls came too. They were tearful, as was Marion.
At the hospital, Jim and the girls remained in the car, while Marion and
I went inside and saw the matron, who provided us with a few details about our
mother’s death and informed us about the necessity of dealing with certain
formalities. She asked us if we would
like to view our mother. ‘Och no, I
couldn’t possibly,’ said my sister, beginning to weep again. ‘You go,’ she said to me and retreated, in
tears, to Jim and the children outside in the car. I walked up the stairs as if to an
execution.
She lay in the same bed, under a bedcover
that hid her whole body and was pulled up to her chin. She now looked even smaller, thinner, older
and greyer. A thin strip of cloth around
her head and under her jaw made sure her mouth remained closed. The flowers I’d left with her were now in a
vase and Salisbury Crags still grimaced beyond the window. I stood by the bed, incapable of movement
and speech and feeling, aware of the silence of the other women in beds in the
ward and how they expected me to say something, do something, to break down,
with my hands reaching out for her, to kiss her. But I couldn’t. For what I saw was not my mother, not the
colourful, extravagant, handsome, outgoing, laughing woman I remembered and had
known all my life. What I saw was a
husk, a shell, a chrysalis. She wasn’t
there. She had gone. The butterfly had flown.
She hadn’t wanted me to see her like that,
so old and ill, and, unselfishly as ever, she had removed herself from my life
by letting herself fade away and yield softly to the night.
The matron led me away. She advised me about the procedures that had
to be followed after someone dies. Of
these matters I knew nothing. But the
death had to be registered and a funeral director found. The matron gave me the names and addresses
of both. There was little that could be
done, however, as it was a Saturday.
Besides, I needed to consult with my sister about arranging the
interment and finding a minister, and about telling relatives and friends, by
telegram, of our mother’s death. Her
older sisters had already died, Aunt Ada a year ago. But the Frasers in Glasgow
had to be told, and the Duncans, and Aunt Donny in Bournemouth. Announcements also had to be made in the
Scottish newspapers, which would include the date and place of the
funeral. Nothing and no one prepares
you for a death in a family, nor for what has to be done. And there was a complication – Monday was a
Bank Holiday.
Marion
had previously written to Aunt Donny.
Two or three days after receiving this letter AD received a telegram to
say that Louie had died. In her
Memories she wrote, ‘It was a tremendous and distressing shock … I managed to
contact Marion by telephone – although there wasn’t a telephone in her home at
the time – and offered to travel up immediately. But Marion
told me that Ronald (Gordon) was already in Edinburgh and being tremendously
supportive. He had taken charge of all
the funeral arrangements, and she thought it was quite unnecessary for me to
make a special journey to Edinburgh
when there was nothing more that could be done for Louie now.’
Back in Broomhall I lay that night on the
sofa-bed in the living-room without moving, rigid, as if I too had died. But I couldn’t sleep -- my mind was heavy
with competing memories and memos to myself of what needed to be done, so heavy
that my mind felt like an impenetrable, impervious block of stone. And then, in the darkness of my mind, a pale
finger appeared above my head, descended and entered my brain and touched
something lightly there. It was as if a
switch had been turned off. And I
slept.
My mother was buried towards the end of
the week in Morningside
Cemetery, in my father’s
grave, which still had no stone. We had
asked mourners to assemble at the cemetery and about a dozen friends and
relatives did so, including Aunt Jenny and Uncle Alastair. Marion and I followed the hearse from the
undertakers in one of their big black cars, just the two of us, sitting
self-consciously apart from each other in the back. Jim was minding his daughters in
Broomhall.
When the car stopped at the cemetery
gates, one of the dark-suited pall-bearers came to my side of the car and gave
me my mother’s wedding ring, which had been taken from her left hand. Why he did so, and why he did so then, I do
not know. But rather than put the ring,
a gold band, in a jacket pocket, I slipped it onto the ring finger of my left
hand. She had large hands and it
comfortably fitted my finger.
The Rev Gillan, who had married Marion and
Jim at the Fairmilehead church in 1954, conducted a brief service at the open
grave. I stood, with Marion, at the head of the grave, under a small
chestnut tree. It had been a cool and
cloudy morning, but when the coffin was lowered into the grave and the minister
spoke the words about ‘a good and faithful servant’, a shaft of sunlight flared
over the grave before fading away.
The
wake that followed the funeral was held in my sister’s home in Broomhall, a
comforting occasion among my mother’s family and friends, who were amply
supplied with cakes and sandwiches, whisky, beer and tea. I hadn’t seen some of them for quite some time,
and I wouldn’t see most of them ever again.
I left Edinburgh the following day, taking with me a
copy of my mothers’ death certificate, dated 2 August despite the fact that 2
August had been Bank Holiday Monday. It
was signed by James Miller, the Registrar for the District of Newington, and by
me. I must have seen him on that day
and provided him with all the necessary personal details. My mother had died at 11.55 am. The causes of death were given as ‘cerebral
thrombosis’ and ‘carcinoma of breast with gross metastasis.’ Her age was given as 66 – she would have
been 67 a week later, on 9 August. I
had thought that she was younger, that she had been born in 1900, like AD. But her birth certificate revealed that she
had been born in 1898, two and a half weeks after my father.
The stubs in her chequebook for May, June
and July showed that rental payments to Mrs McCallan varied between £3 and £4
and that she had sent me a cheque for £15-11-10 in May. The last payment, of £2-10, was made out to
Blyths, a downmarket store in Lothian
Road, on 22 July.
Another payment, made out to Morningside, must have been for the upkeep
of the cemetery where my father had been buried. It was for £1-5-0. Her current account with the National Commercial
Bank of Scotland
was closed on 15 September.
Marion had the task of sorting through my
mother’s few possessions in 4 Craiglockhart Road, and in due course I received
my school reports, my mother’s photo albums and the letters she had saved, as
well as a painting she had made of Edinburgh Castle seen from Calton Hill and
the only relic of India that had not been sold, a small wooden octagonal table
inlaid with ivory designs. There were
also some brass Indian figurines. I
have them still – and the ring, which I now wear.
It was probably at this time that Mrs
McCallan told Marion
that she had once found our mother sitting on the stairs, sobbing and clutching
her swollen arm, an image that haunts me still. She had once been beautiful, cherished and
admired, and she was now virtually friendless and alone and bore the blemishing
disfigurement of a vile disease.
Suspecting that this disease would kill
her, she had made her will and signed it on 15 November 1963. It was witnessed by two women, one a
neighbour, whom I did not know. In the
will she bequeathed her ‘whole estate, heritable and moveable, real and
personal of whatever nature’ to Marion
and to me, to be divided equally between us.
Marion
was appointed her executor, and the estate was confirmed by the Commissariot of
Edinburgh on 3 September 1965 as amounting to £509-11-4. Most of this sum, £493, was in a deposit
account. There was just over £1 in the
current account.
It was the £250 or so that I received
from my mother’s will – and the fact that ITN had offered me a permanent job as
a newscaster – that started me thinking about buying a flat.
Some two weeks after I returned to London I went down to Bournemouth
to see AD and tell her about my mother’s death and funeral and about ITN.
She wrote, ‘His days in Edinburgh had been very sad, but he gave me
two pieces of news that I found most pleasing.
Firstly, he had been able to provide his mother, months before she died,
with the television set he knew she wanted but had considered a luxury she
couldn’t afford; and secondly … he had been offered and accepted a position on
the permanent staff of ITN. He had now
joined the team of regular newscasters.
This was splendid news, and it must have been of some comfort to Ronald
to know that his mother had lived to enjoy his gift and to see him on TV before
she died. She would have been reassured
to know that his television career was well under way.’
It
was more than a comfort – it was immensely gratifying to know that she had seen
me established in a job, and had been able to see me on the TV set I had hired
for her, as well as on a set in the hospital ward, where she would have proudly
told everyone that I was her son.
It
was in August that David Ellison, at my suggestion, moved into my rented flat
in Prince of Wales Drive.
Before David joined the RSC he had
appeared as a soldier picked up by Rachel Roberts in a major British film, This
Sporting Life, directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Richard Harris. David, who was a quiet, solid and handsome
lad, would struggle to succeed as an actor, but eventually achieved some fame
in the 80s as steady, dependable Police Sergeant Beck in the TV series, Juliet
Bravo. According to Wikipedia, he gave up acting in
1995 and died in Devon in June 2010.
Perhaps I needed company after my mother’s
death, never having lived on my own before.
Perhaps I was just being kind.
David had been in The Wars of the Roses and was now out of work and on
the dole. Whether he paid a minimum
rent or paid his way by buying the groceries, I don’t remember. He had few possessions and slept on the
sofa-bed in the living-room. He stayed
in most of the time, watched TV and was no trouble at all. But then he asked me if his girlfriend,
Jessica Claridge, could stay for a while.
She had also been in The Wars of the Roses and had been staying with her
parents up north. Now she wanted to
return to London
to look for work.
The trouble was that they took over the
living-room. They were there when went
I went to work and they were there when I got back. The only place I could call my own – female
garments and cosmetics had taken over the bathroom – was my bedroom. I was outnumbered. They both had to go, as I couldn’t separate
them. So I lied. I invented some excuse about Michael
Williams wanting his flat back, and they left.
Perhaps
it was this episode that contributed towards my idea of buying a flat – now
that I was about to receive the half of my mother’s estate and my wages at ITN
were going to increase and be regularly paid from 1 September, at least for a
year or so. I didn’t expect that I
would be at ITN for long. Except when I
was reading the news I felt at a disadvantage, as I had no journalistic
instincts and wasn’t all that interested in political matters and foreign or
current affairs.
But I saw that being at ITN publicised my
name and helped to promote my creative ambitions and pursuits. In August a piece about me appeared in the
TV Times. There were minor biographical
inaccuracies, which I would get used to over the years. But it mentioned The Miracles and Paradise
Lost and ended, ‘Apart from his prowess as newscaster and his natural ability
in front of the cameras, his interests are fiction writing, acting and
production, and journalism, though he moves in theatrical rather than
journalistic circles. He has few
sporting interests – but he plays a good game of bridge.’ All that came in fact from Peter Snow, who,
because I wasn’t at ITN when the article writer rang, blithely answered his
questions, which the writer lazily passed off as if I had talked to him. I wasn’t pleased with the writer, or Peter,
who should have known better.
Another piece about me also appeared in
August, in the London Evening News, under the headline – ‘Gordon happy – and
here’s why.’ It said, ‘Gordon
Honeycombe is a very happy man these days – and with good reason! He has recently had his appointment as an
ITN newscaster confirmed – and on Tuesday (repeated on Wednesday) a sizeable
excerpt from his play, Redemption, will be shown on the Schools programme,
Mysteries and Miracles.’ This was part
of a worthy five-part Rediffusion series about Drama for schoolchildren aged 14
and over. It was my first play to be
televised.
I had been interviewed for this article
and so the facts were consequently fairly detailed and accurate. The reporter commented, perceptively, ‘It
has been quite a long trek for Gordon to the newsdesk at ITN,’ and he
concluded, ‘It’s unlikely that Gordon Honeycombe will ever be content to do
just one job. His mind is far too
active for that.’
In September, a third, reasonable article
appeared in TV World. In all three
articles I was pictured with my brushed back hair and a white hankie poking
from the breast pocket of my suit.
One day, while I was living in Prince of
Wales Mansions, I experienced an accidental brush with fame (not mine). The doorbell rang and I opened it to find
three children on the landing, looking a bit embarrassed. ‘Yes?’ I said. The oldest one asked me if my name was
Honeycombe. Yes, it is,’ I replied – my
surname was on a tab beside the door.
‘Are you a Honeycomb?’ ‘Yes, I
am.’ It took me a while to realise that
they thought that a pop group called the Honeycombs lived in 79A. I don’t think they believed me when I said I
wasn’t a pop group or part of pop group.
Disappointed, they drifted away.
The Honeycombs were a short-lived North London
group, who had a female drummer called Honey Lantree, a part-time hairdresser
-- thus the Honeycombs, as the group was named by Pye Records. Their song, ‘Have I the Right?’ had topped
the charts the previous year. A few
years later they split up.
Another day, or rather a night, two cars
collided with a loud bang in the road below my windows. I phoned the police and wearing a
dressing-gown over my pyjamas went down to see if anyone was injured and what
had happened. No one was. The cars were damaged but not wrecked. Although I talked to the police I was
unable to assist them with their on-the-spot investigations as I hadn’t seen
the collision. But there was a certain
dramatic aspect to the scene, the blue lights of the police cars, the broken
metal and glass on the road, and the muted voices of neighbours and of those
involved.
Meanwhile, I was working on irregular days
at ITN. On 17 September a notice was
sent to ‘All Staff’ from the Deputy Editor, David Nicholas. It reproduced what the Prime Minister,
Harold Wilson, had said at the Guildhall the night before, at a gala dinner
celebrating the 10th anniversary of ITV. He said, ‘Tonight we celebrate not only ten
years of independent television, but ten years of ITN. And again I would pay my tribute tonight, as
I’m sure we all would, to Geoffrey Cox, and to all those with him who have
created such an important and respected organ of British news coverage and
British news dissemination. It’s no
secret that there was a fight in the early years to maintain the time allocated
to ITN. But its integrity has never
been in question. It’s lively, it’s
virile, it’s hard-hitting – I don’t agree with all it says, and I’m sure Mr
Macleod doesn’t always either.’ Iain
Macleod was a leading member of the Conservative shadow cabinet, which was led
by Edward Heath.
This praising of ITN by a Prime Minister
and the articles about me made me realise that the organisation, and my part in
it, were more important than I’d thought.
Although I didn’t officially become a member of the National Union of
Journalists until July the following year, I must have been made aware, by the
NUJ rep at ITN, that I had certain rights.
For on 21 September I wrote to Bill Hodgson, ITN’s General Manager,
‘According to the NUJ agreement I’m entitled to 4 weeks and 6 days holiday a
year and no more than a 70 hour or 8 day fortnight. I work a 9 hour shift from 2.30 pm to 11.30
pm (and a longer shift on Saturdays and Sundays). I conclude therefore that I should be
working for no more than 186 days in the year for ITN and be paid more for any
day over this.’
On the advice of my accountant at Stanton
Potel, whom I’d acquired in March the previous year – I also now had a
solicitor, Peter Hampson at Lee & Pemberton -- I managed to establish with
ITN, and the Ministry of Social Security, that I was self-employed. This allowed me to do any other jobs --which
didn’t compromise ITN and would not be ‘detrimental to your efficiency and
standing as a newscaster and television journalist.’ Nonetheless I always told ITN if I was
appearing elsewhere on television, as a writer, presenter or performer, for any
other ITV or BBC company, and in effect sought their blessing or
permission.
Further letters ratified that I would be
paid 12½ guineas per day from 23 August 1965 to 22 August 1966, such payments
to be made in arrears on the first day of each month. At the end of October I informed ITN that
I’d worked in August as a newscaster for a total of 14 days, as well as coming
in to voice films; that in September I did 14 days of newscasting and two days
sub-editing; and that in October I read the news on 13 days and sub-edited on
eight.
This pattern of newscasting levelled off
at about 11 days a month. Even so I
read the news more often than Gardner and Bosanquet, who were involved in
presenting ITN Reports and Dateline, while Peter Snow was also employed as a
reporter or interviewer on major stories.
Sheridan Morley was occasionally employed to read the headlines and the
lunchbox. I was unaware that Sheridan
(Sherry) was at the time using his free time to write a biography of Noel
Coward, A Talent to Amuse, which was published in 1969.
All these mornings off, apart from when I
was at ITN on Saturdays and Sundays, together with the 10 to 15 days when I
wasn’t required at ITN, afforded me a good deal of time to write, and I
continued to revise, type and retype what I had already written -- a stage
play, The Twelfth Day of Christmas, written while I was at Oxford; my novel
about school, Moving On; a screenplay I had written based on Maggie Drabble’s
first novel, A Summer Birdcage; and Neither the Sea Nor the Sand. By the end of the year I had begun work on a
third, satirical novel about a theatre company, not unlike the RSC, which had
as its leading character, a young actor, not unlike Paul Greenhalgh, who was in
love with his older brother, amongst others.
It was called The Book of David and was never finished. My mistake was to discuss the story-line
with friends and show the incomplete MSS to agents, never a good idea.
But my main pre-occupation during the last
six months of 1965 was the finding of a flat that I might buy.
I looked no further than Battersea. For although Battersea was largely
working-class and more old-fashioned than fashionable, it had the park, a
usefully diverse collection of shops in Battersea Park Road, and frequent buses
and trains. The nearest Underground
station was across the river in Sloane
Square, which was on the edge of Chelsea, where were all the upmarket shops,
pubs, stores and restaurants along King’s Road. Properties in Chelsea were beyond my financial reach, as
were most of the two-bedroom units in Prince
of Wales Drive.
Local estate agents directed me to flats
up for sale in the area, and I concentrated my attention on another road lined
with four-storey mansion blocks of flats that was behind Prince of Wales Drive. It was called Lurline Gardens. Here the flats faced south and caught the
sun. Michael Williams’ flat was usually
quite dark, as it got no sun and overlooked the tall dense plane trees
bordering the park. In a plain,
brick-faced block rather grandly called Albert Palace Mansions a fourth floor
flat, number 139, was up for sale. This
was good, as the main bedroom and the sitting-room had extensive though
unexceptional views over south London, which
included the distant ridge of Lavender Hill and the railway line that had taken
me many times from Waterloo, via Clapham, to
Southampton and to Bournemouth. It also had two bedrooms and a
dining-room. The owner was asking
£4,250.
Towards the end of August, with my
continued employment at ITN assured and with the money my mother had left me, I
made an offer of £3,750. This was
turned down, but negotiations proceeded and resulted in a contract being drawn
up in October. In November, after a
surveyor had made a report, I agreed to pay £4,000 -- if certain repairs and
renovations were made to the flat.
These included the painting in white of all the doors and all the window
frames, and the repair of any loose or broken floorboards and any damage to the
walls. At the same time I also took out
a mortgage of £3,000.
In the meantime I had arranged with a removal
firm, John H Lunn to collect such items that my mother had left me from my
sister and from Mrs McCallan on 11 November and put them in their store in London until I moved into
139 Albert Palace Mansions.
I don’t recall whether I or the previous
owner of 139 paid for the wall-paper or the carpeting (probably not), but apart
from that, a fridge and bathroom fittings had to be bought, as well as light
fittings, lamps, side-tables, a gas cooker, kitchen table and chairs, two
armless chairs in black ambler, a bed-settee, a double bed, a single bed, a
mattress and other items, most of which were obtained at Peter Jones in Sloane
Square, the bill amounting to £508-6-5.
I found a large Victorian wardrobe, a solid, leafed dinner-table and a
set of allegedly Georgian chairs in a warehouse stuffed with heavy dark
furniture near Tottenham Court Road.
Electric fires had to be bought, as there was no heating in the flat,
and I had a telephone installed in November and hired a TV set. Various bits and pieces which had belonged
to my mother, including bed linen, cutlery, glasses, kitchen utensils and the
octagonal Indian side-table, arrived from Edinburgh
in due course.
Eventually, when I had central heating
installed and carpeting, as opposed to vinyl flooring, in the bathroom, as well
as flock wallpaper on the bathroom walls, I felt that, as a home-owner, I had
arrived. When I sold the flat at 139
Albert Palace Mansions in July 1972, moving north of Regent’s Park to a
top-floor flat at 30 Ainger Road,
Primrose Hill, it fetched £15,250.
Two days before my birthday on 27
September – I would be 29 -- I entrained for Southampton to see AD depart for South Africa on
the MS Jagersfontein. She travelled
first class, and showed me and some friends of hers around the ship, which
revived memories for me of the Asturias
and the Andes. AD would be in South
Africa for six months, most of the time there being spent
as a companion to an elderly woman in Cape
Town. One day
I hoped I’d be able to travel in style on an ocean-going liner and see more of
the world. And one day I did, on a P
& O cruise, on a Russian cruise ship, and more than once on the QE2.
I moved into 139 Albert Palace Mansions in
the first week of December 1965, and my main exercise for the next seven years
was running up the four flights of stairs to reach my front door. Pleased as I was to be the owner of my own
home, after years of living in digs, hotel rooms and rented properties, I was
living well beyond my means. With unpaid
bills, a mortgage and all the minor necessities that had to be purchased, not
to mention food and drink, my account with the National Provincial Bank was
overdrawn five months later by £900. So
I took a lodger to help defray some of the costs of having a home of my own.
John Shearer was a few years younger than
me and had also been at Oxford. Having been a trainee at ITN he was now a
junior reporter. He was bouncy,
energetic and an excellent lodger as he was hardly ever in the flat, often
being away when he was reporting, and when in London spending time with his
parents and his girl-friend, Doina Thomas.
She became a good friend of mine
when they broke up and used to advise me about my writing and other
matters. Through her I met Adam Acworth
and as a result wrote Adam’s Tale.
John eventually joined BBC TV in Bristol, settling in Somerset,
and married Tamasin Day-Lewis, sister of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. When working for ITN and living in London, he used 139 for
bed and breakfast and only occasionally sat down to watch TV with me. The breakfasts were minimal, consisting of
tea and toast and cereal. I had no
interest in cooking, and disliked the business of washing up, and when I was in
my new home, never got further than biscuits and cheese in the evenings or
boiled eggs and beans on toast. At
other times I warmed up meals that came in packets or tins, or had a meal or
sandwiches in the local pub in Battersea
Park Road, the Eagle.
For the first time in my life I had to look
after myself in a home that I actually owned, paying rates and other dues. I already had an accountant, a solicitor,
and an agent, and now I acquired a cleaner, a small Irish woman called Mary,
who dwelt in a nearby council estate of ugly tower blocks. Laundry I took to a launderette, where I
left it to be washed and dried.
Dry-cleaners dealt with my shirts and trousers. Needing new suits to wear at ITN – I think I
only had one (and a college blazer and slacks) – I bought a couple of second-hand
suits at a shop of cast-off clothes in Buckingham Palace Road, which friends,
hearing of this, joked about me wearing dead mens’ clothes, which I suppose
they were. But I couldn’t afford to buy
a new suit or have one made.
My neighbours in the other flat on the
fourth floor, 140, which was at the rear, were four assorted youngish men
interested in other men. Gay was not a
word in use then and is now much misapplied and misused. Two of them may have been an item. The youngest, David, was a sweet fellow with
a small rugby-playing boy-friend, and the eldest, a bearded Scot was learned as
well as humourous, and later on I based my Professor MacDougall in Dragon Under
the Hill on him. I didn’t see much of
them – David occasionally visited and told me about his love-life – nor of
another neighbour who moved into the flat below me. This was David Kernan, singer and actor, who
had featured in TW3 and appeared in Zulu.
Later on he was in Side by Side
by Sondheim, and when the show was mooted to transfer to New
York, I was asked if I’d replace Ned Sherrin, who acted as the
narrator in the London
production. The New York deal fell through – Sherrin
remained in the show and I never appeared in it. Nor did I take over as the narrator in The
Rocky Horror Show (which was offered to me) or be the Voice of God in a West End musical about Noah. Neither appealed to me, and so I never
appeared in a West End show. What if I had said Yes, I wonder?
In the week before Christmas I travelled up
to Edinburgh, a journey I would make at least once a year for the next 30
years, and stayed with my sister and her family for a few days. I met up with Danny Penman, as I usually did
around Hogmanay -- in Edinburgh,
or in Kirkcaldy where he lived. I also visited the Edinburgh
Academy – now that I had job I could
show my face there – and my parents’ grave in Morningside Cemetery. It would be several years before I could
afford to have a gravestone made for them, with the names of their two babies who
had died also inscribed thereon.
Back in London I read the news on Christmas Day, 1965,
a Saturday, the headlines on the Sunday, and both bulletins on the Monday,
which had been designated as Boxing Day.
A yellowing copy of the typed weekly rota
for that week tells me that the Output Editors for the 25th, 26th
and 27th were Geoffrey Cox himself (on Christmas Day), Derek Murray
and David Phillips, that the chief-subs were Derek Murray, Alec Spink and Jon
Lander, that the bulletin directors were Ron Fouracre, Diana Edwards-Jones and
Michael Piper, that the voices were Bob Bateman and Douglas Cameron. On Sunday the 26th Peter Snow
read the main bulletin, while I read the headlines. From then on I regularly read the news at
Christmas and on Bank Holidays (though usually not on New Year’s Eve) as I was
the youngest of the newscasters – I became so when Peter Snow left (he was
younger than me) -- and the only unmarried one.
In January 1966 a copy of the rota for
that month tells me that from 6 January I read the main bulletin and the
headlines on 11 days, and was a sub-editor or script-writer on six. In February I was a newscaster on 10 days,
and was a script-writer three times and a sub-editor once. Reggie Bosanquet, who continued to present
Dateline four times a week, only read the news on Wednesdays, the day that
Andrew Gardner presented Reporting 66, and the night on which Sheridan Morley
read the headlines. Sherry also read
the lunchbox headlines every Sunday.
Peter Snow was now reading less news, doing so only six times that
February. Eventually, like many presenters
who began at ITN, he joined the BBC.
In February I acquired a literary agent,
Frank Rudman. Having already signed an
ITN contract I didn’t think I needed a TV agent as well. Rudman was lumbered with all my written work
to date – the first version of Neither the Sea Nor the Sand; the school story,
Moving On, which I’d completed in 1958; the as yet untyped play I’d written
while at Oxford, The Twelfth Day of Christmas; and the scripts of A Summer
Birdcage and United!.
My pocket diary for 1966 is largely a
blank. But letters reveal that, writing
from ITN, I managed in March to get on the list of showbiz journalists, mainly
critics, who were invited to press-show previews of films in Wardour Street distributed by Rank,
Warner and ABPC. These showings, in
small basement theatres, included free drinks and snacks, and were a very
agreeable way of seeing some of the latest films – except for the night in 1972
I saw a preview of the film of Neither the Sea Nor the Sand and cringed.
I more than cringed when I tripped up on
words when reading the news. In my
first year I said that Cassius Clay was five stone two, instead of fifteen
stone two. In reading the teleprompter
too hastily my eye had caught the five and not the fifteen. Correcting the error only made things worse
by drawing attention to it. I really
messed up when, in a royal story, I blithely spoke of ‘Princess Charles and
Prince Anne.’ Realising fearfully what
I had said, I fatally paused for a few seconds.
‘I mean,’ I said – and then couldn’t think what I meant. Which had which title? ‘I mean …’ Speaking very carefully and
slowly, I said, ‘Prince … Charles … and Princess Anne.’
Ivor Mills, who used to read the Early
News later on in place of me, was once faced with an unscheduled hand-over to a
correspondent who had suddenly appeared outside Parliament, live, with the MP
or cabinet minister he was going to interview about the top story of the
day. All Ivor was told, by the director
yelling in his ear, was “Hand over to Julian!”
And Ivor calmly and confidently said, “And here he is … Talking to him.”
The pronunciation of foreign and even some
Scottish, Welsh and Irish names could cause problems. I used to imitate what the BBC said and, if
in doubt, phoned their Pronunciation Department. At ITN we newscasters derived some amusement
from the names of African heads of state, like Odingo Odonga and President
Banana. For a time we were at odds over an African
leader called Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, until we conferred and agreed on how we
would all pronounce his name -- whereupon he was shot and killed. Later on, the Vietnam War produced some
awkward place names, like Ban Me Tuat (pronounced Twat). Then there was Phuoc Me. Amazingly no one seemed to notice that I was
the first newscaster to swear on television when I had to refer to a Vietnamese
village called Fuk Yew.
In April 1966 I began inquiring about
possible employment by the BBC World Service in Bush House and even wrote to
the SSTS. This was followed by a few
letters and phone-calls to BBC TV news and current affairs programmes. It was all quite desultory and casual, and
was prompted by the fact that I’d been summoned to see the Editor, who
suggested it might be a good idea if I sought ‘alternative employment’. I assumed that he thought that I would be
better suited to something like a features programme with another ITV company
or indeed with the BBC. I didn’t occur
to me that I was being sacked. If I
was, three months’ notice would have to have been given, and it wasn’t. So I asked around, and more out of curiosity
than need, phoned and wrote to various persons and TV companies.
Nothing on offer particularly attracted
me, except for the chance to become a reporter on Tomorrow’s World, which had
been launched by BBC TV in July 1965, and was presented by Raymond Baxter. That job would be taken up by James Burke,
an exact contemporary of mine at Oxford, where
he had studied English at Jesus
College. He went on to front Tomorrow’s World for
many years, and when I met him I was able to tell him that he got the job
because I had turned it down.
An alternative was to become a newsreader
on BBC Radio, as I could have done, but there was a stuffiness and shabby
bureaucratic atmosphere about Broadcasting House that didn’t appeal. I preferred the highly charged and lively
atmosphere of live television at ITN, not to mention the days and hours in
which I was free to write and pursue my other interests and activities.
And so I remained at ITN, and nothing was
said about ‘alternative employment,’ although the management tested my
capabilities dealing with persons who were to be interviewed, and with
reporting. I once accompanied Michael
Nicholson and a TV crew to Stonehenge to cover
some Druidic ceremonies in June. But
the very early hour of departure, the time it took to get there, and back, and
the standing about waiting for something filmable and newsworthy to happen,
seemed to me to be a hugely tedious waste of time. As a result I may have told the management
that I’d prefer just to read the news -- and by then the management may have
begun to realise that I was becoming increasingly popular with the
viewers.
I had started getting letters from female
viewers, and ultimately, in the 1970s, got more, per week, per month – so the
newscasters’ secretary told me – than Bosanquet, Gardner and Snow. I was sent birthday cards, Easter and
Christmas cards, and various gifts like socks and scarves to keep me warm, and
cough lozenges when I sounded hoarse. A
man sent me boxes of cigars, and every month a woman sent me poetry she had
written. Once I received some silk
pyjamas, which I reluctantly returned, and for a time a pink rose was sent
anonymously to me every week. Some
writers hinted (and more than hinted) that they were in love with me. But no one was crude or obscene – Reggie, I
believe, received a few letters like that.
Some viewers asked me to give them a sign that I had received a letter,
like touching my nose or putting a pen in the breast pocket of my suit. Most urged me to smile – just for them. I replied politely and briefly to all the
letters, thanking the writers for their kind remarks and saying I was glad they
liked the news.
Dorothy Stuckey, who was the newscasters’
secretary when I joined ITN, told TV Times, ‘The newscasters realise that many
of the people who write are very lonely.
It is hard for them to be understanding and responsive without being too
encouraging.’ It became evident to me
that some women, unmarried or widowed and elderly, looked on me as a
gentleman-caller, the only nicely spoken, well-dressed gentleman who visited
them regularly and sat, in a box, in a corner of their sitting-rooms -- someone
who spoke to them, said ‘Good evening,’ and smiled at them before he went
away. An old lady once wrote and asked
me if I liked her new curtains.
Dogs and babies also enjoyed my
appearances. So I was told by their
owners and mothers. A dog called Trixie
used to sit in front of the TV set whenever I appeared and give me her rapt attention
for the duration of the news. She
sometimes fetched her toys and laid them at my (imaginary) feet. A mother wrote to me from Bridlington in East Yorkshire about ‘a very firm fan of yours.’ She said, ‘He is my 11 months old son,
Simon. Since he was 8 months old he’s
sat in his baby walker & watched you from start to finish, but the funny
thing is he has a beam on his face that no other newscaster is allowed to see.’
Some viewers wrote regularly for a year or
more. Margaret Hubbard, who looked
after her aged mother in Pickering, Yorkshire,
wrote faithfully every week for 12 years, telling me about what was happening
in her life and sending me newspaper cuttings about aspects of village and Yorkshire life. I
replied once a month.
The
saddest, strangest, and funniest letters I kept, and I still have them.
Those people who recognised me in the
street or on a train or in a shop and greeted me or wanted to shake my hand
were a bit of an embarrassment, for although I was not a stranger to them, they
were strangers to me. I wasn’t
instantly recognisable, as out of doors I usually wore a cap or hat, and
glasses, and I was very tall. Being
seen on TV, in mid-shot or close-up, doesn’t afford a viewer any indication of
your height. But I learned to be
pleasant and smile and look them in the eye, and thank them for the nice things
they said.
Now back to 1966.
Unknown to me, Sir Geoffrey Cox, who was
knighted at the beginning of the year, had been preoccupied for many months
with the planning of ITN’s coverage of the General Election. Election 66, which went on air on the
evening of polling day, 31 March, was fronted by Alastair Burnet, assisted by
Andrew, Peter and Reggie, and it even included me, dealing with the rest of the
news. There is a brief video recording
of me doing just that, sounding quite brisk and competent, and looking
confident and slim. I was beginning at
last to put on weight, having been a skinny 12 stone plus since I stopped
growing. By November 1972 I was 13
stone 8.
I was 30 in September 1966, and in October
I was back in Oxford,
wearing hired mortar-board and gown, to pick up my MA, as did Sid. All that I had to do for this was to remain
on Univ’s books, turn up for the ceremony, be hit on the head with a Bible, and
pay £12. AD was there to witness the
ceremony, as was Sid’s wife. Their
first son was born the following year.
Interviewed by phone by both the Weekly
Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News when I was in Edinburgh for Christmas, I was described,
mortifyingly, by the News as ‘one of TV’s most eligible bachelors’ – how the
media insist on using labels! -- and reported to be staying with my sister,
‘Mrs Marion Campbell and her family in Corstorphine.’ I apparently revealed that few people
recognised me in my off-duty hours – ‘They don’t expect to see a newscaster
sitting opposite them on their bus or tube train.’ It was also revealed that I had travelled
north by train – ‘Because I have too much imagination to fly. After all, there’s nothing but six inches
between you and the angels.’ I said a
plane was like ‘a cigar with wings.’
Both papers reported that I was working on
my third novel, a satire (The Book of David) and was busy rewriting my second
manuscript, a so-called horror story in the Edgar Allan Poe style. According to the Weekly Scotsman I regarded
my first novel (Moving On) as my best work to date. It was said to be ‘about a group of senior
students about to face the world.’ The
Weekly Scotsman also reported that special occasions and parties gave me an
opportunity to wear a kilt ‘of Fraser tartan,’ my mother having been a
Fraser. It was a red and black tartan,
a dress tartan, as opposed to the two other tartans the clan had.
I disliked being interviewed, knowing that
my rambling replies to questions and my over-extensive explanations might be
written down wrongly, reduced and paraphrased. I liked seeing my name in print, but not
what I was reported to have said. But
I hoped that interviews would help to publicise my writing, and that my name
would one day be known because of my writing, not because I read the news. Vain hope.
I now get introduced at certain functions as a TV newsreader, usually
said to have worked for the BBC, and not as the author of 15 books.
Since Election 66 Sir Geoffrey Cox had
been planning a half-hour news programme, despite the dogged resistance of most
of the other ITV companies, and the following year, on Monday, 3 July 1967,
News at Ten went on air for the first time.
Big Ben was seen and punchy music heard – the bongs (headlines) were
read – and the first news duo appeared, Alastair Burnet and Andrew Gardner.
At the end of its first week the weekend
TV critics were uniformly hostile, expressing their disappointment and
derision. And then the ratings were disseminated. All five of New at Ten’ s programmes were in
the Top Twenty and two were in the Top Ten.
Audiences ranged from 4.45 million homes to 6.9 million. The BBC’s Twenty-Four Hours never reached
more than half of these totals. News at
Ten was here to stay.
And so was I. For now that Andrew, Reggie and Sandy Gall
became the sole presenters of ITN’s flagship news, someone had to read the
Early News, as it became known – it was at 5.55 and then moved to 5.50 – and
also the weekend news bulletins. That
someone was me, backed up by Ivor Mills, Robert Southgate and Rory Macpherson,
all of whom also functioned as reporters.
What the management never seemed to notice, or heed, was that the Early
News and the weekend bulletins had larger audiences, up to 11 and then 13
million on some occasions, than News at Ten.
I was the cuckoo in the nest, and it was something of a surprise, to
Andrew, Reggie and the rest of ITN, and also to me, when in October 1970 the
readers of the Daily Mirror voted for me as the most popular of all the
newsreaders on national TV, ahead of Robert Dougall and Leonard Parkin. A similar poll, in The Sun in February
1976, hailed ‘Gorgeous Gordon’ as the ‘dishiest’ newscaster.
Long before this, in July 1968, Sir Geoffrey
Cox had left ITN and was replaced as Editor by a senior reporter and producer,
Nigel Ryan, who remained at ITN, as I did, until 1977.
Colour had come to television in July
1967. It was first seen on BBC 2. In my flat in Lurline
Gardens I gazed in wonder at the
bright and garish colour pictures that were being transmitted from Wimbledon. And I gazed with even more wonder at the moon,
high over South London, on the night of 20
July 1969. The Eagle had landed and
there was a man on the moon, or rather two men when Neil Armstrong was joined
by Buzz Aldrin. It was more than
historic. It was utterly incredible,
and it would be the first of five moon landings. The conquest of space, of worlds without
end, had begun.
It wasn’t until 15 November 1969 that five
of the ITV companies, as well as ITN, began transmitting all their programmes
in colour, by which time ITN had moved house, occupying an eight-storey tower,
named ITN House, at 48 Wells
Street, W1, on 4 August 1969.
The first news that went out from there,
though not in colour, was the Early News, presented by me on 4 August 1969 from
the capacious ground-floor studio at the back of the building. The
newsroom was on the first floor and the bar and canteen on the eighth. Opposite the front door were a wine bar and
a pub, the King’s Arms. There was
another pub at the rear of the building, and a plethora of ethnic and other
restaurants in the area, like Chez Gerard, all much patronised by the boozier
and hungrier journalists in the newsroom.
There was also a Green Room near the
ground-floor Reception, where politicians, union leaders and other guests, at
ITN to be interviewed, gathered for a convivial drink. When I occasionally ventured there I was
struck by how ordinary these important people seemed to be, and, like Harold
Wilson, Edward Heath and Hugh Scanlon, how small. In the Kingsway building I had been far from
impressed by the egotistic bombast of Gerald Nabarro and John Stonehouse, who
burst into the studio during rehearsals, introduced themselves and insisted on
shaking my hand.
The
Green Room guests at ITN House were looked after by output editors, chief-subs
and Reggie. Andrew wasn’t a drinker –
Reggie was. He would take a plastic cup
of red wine into the studio, which might be mistaken for a cup of water, and
refresh himself during the rehearsal as well as during the news. Noted by female viewers for the twinkle in
his eye and his roguish smile, he could sometimes sound somewhat slurred. This was attributed to a childhood injury,
which allegedly caused the muscles on one side of his face to slacken when he
was tired. There was of course another
reason. But Reggie was never sent home
– as Leonard Parkin once was before doing the News at Ten. He had
attended a wedding earlier in the day and then continued drinking in the local
wine bar.
It seems that some BBC newsreaders also
enjoyed a drink. Peter Woods at the BBC (for a time he was
ITN’s correspondent in New York)
had been at an in-house celebration in 1976 when he sat down to read the 7.30
News on BBC 2. He was more than
slurred. When he had to read a list of
trade figures and deficits, the millions and thousands involved defeated him
and he blurrily confided, ‘And the trade gap … is an awfully big one.’ Whereupon the news was faded out and Robin
Day appeared earlier than planned.
Afterwards the BBC announced that Peter Woods had a sinus problem and
had been taking some medication to deal with it.
Now and then, especially at the weekend, I
might also drink too much red wine during a meal in an Italian restaurant or in
the wine bar or the Green Room. But I
wasn’t alone in this. I remember when
one of the control-room directors, who was animatedly cueing the newscaster and
the news, gesticulated in such a theatrical fashion that he fell off his
chair. He was wearing a feather boa at
the time.
Although much else happened in the next 25
years of my life, which culminated in my move to Australia, where I became a
permanent resident in November 1993, all that is another story. Most of it is to be found in the Honeycombe
Archive on the Internet or in the Photo and Scrapbook sections of my website.
How better to end here and now with an
unpublished contemporary account about ITN that I wrote in 1973, not relying,
as now, on my memory or other sources, an account that says what it was like to
be at ITN in those days and to read the TV news.
‘There are two sets of newscasters at ITN –
those who do the Early News, at 5.50 pm, and the bulletins on Saturdays – and
those who do the News at Ten and Sundays.
On the Early are myself and Ivor Mills, supported by Rory Macpherson and
Robert Southgate. On News at Ten are
Andrew Gardner and Reginald Bosanquet, backed up by Leonard Parkin and Sandy
Gall, and occasionally by Peter Snow and Jon Lander. Andrew, Reggie and I are desk men – that is,
we don’t go out reporting. We three have
been newscasting the longest – Reggie since 1955 – and although I’m 36, I’m still
the youngest.
‘You may have wondered what and where ITN
is. Independent Television News has its
offices and studios in an eight-storey building, ITN House, near Oxford Circus
in London. The building also houses several foreign
news organisations. We don’t have any
contact with the entertainment side of ITV.
You should think of ITN as a television newspaper, and in fact our
newsroom looks very like a Fleet Street office – men in shirtsleeves,
telephones ringing, teleprinters and type-writers clattering, much consultation
and activity.
‘I still get nervous sometimes when reading
the news. I’ve learned to cope with
most emergencies, but one can’t be at peak form exactly at 5.50 pm every day,
and it can be a fairly shattering experience to have one’s lapses and
inadequacies exposed – not just to ten million viewers, but more alarmingly to
one’s bosses and colleagues. How would
you feel about having your day’s work held up for viewing and seen and critically
examined by everyone in your office?
‘But what is ITN? ITN is one of 16 separate companies, like Granada, Thames, Scottish, Harlech, Ulster,
ATV, Southern, etc, that make up ITV.
ITN of course only puts out news programmes. We have no income as such and make no
profits. The other companies contribute towards our
expenses, which last year were in the region of £3½ million. This sounds a lot, but remember that we put
out three news programmes every weekday – News at One, the Early News and News
at Ten -- and six at the weekend.
‘My working day – and I work a minimum of
16 days a calendar month at ITN – starts on a weekday at 2.30 pm. I’ll have read the morning papers and
listened to the radio news, and when I arrive in the newsroom I’ll be put in
the picture by the Output Editor about the possible content of the Early
News. Then until the stories start
coming through, I’ll answer my correspondence and read the London evening papers, and grab a cup of tea
and a doughnut off the tea-lady’s trolley when it appears.
‘My
part in the news is only the tip of the iceberg. Besides the many journalists working every
day, about 40, other people involved include film-editors, engineers, videotape
recording (VTR) staff, laboratory technicians, despatch-riders and those in the
Information Library, the Film Library, and the Art department – not forgetting
all the secretaries.
‘Some stories are straight paraphrases of
material sent out by the press agencies.
But we also get information from the regional ITV companies, local
journalists and our own correspondents.
Most stories are covered by our reporters, whose job is not as romantic or
as exciting as it might seem. Their
travels usually take them to some distant village, city or place of industry,
to the scene of some disaster or a war zone overseas, and once they have filmed
their report they have to get it back to London
as fast as possible. To this end every
form of transport has to be used – once it was a camel. It’s a job that demands much tedium, drive
and organisation, and can result in much personal discomfort, exhaustion and
danger. Peter Sissons, reporting the
Nigerian civil war, was shot and badly wounded. In Ulster, on six occasions our
reporters and camera crews have had guns held to their heads. The satisfaction is getting a good story
home, being able to say, “I was there.”
‘In the newsroom, each story is reduced to
the essentials and typed out by a sub-editor or script-writer, who also uses
available film, photos, specially made maps and diagrams to illustrate it. We have a very young team of writers –
qualifications being generally a university education and previous journalistic
or broadcasting experience – and out of 18 writers, six are girls. When I joined ITN in May 1965 there were only
two. We also have two female reporters
now.
‘The story then gets handed back to the
Chief Sub-Editor, who checks it through, edits and cuts it, times it, and
passes it on to the Output Editor, who is in overall charge of the whole
bulletin. He also checks the story,
makes his own alterations, and passes it on to the newscaster. I don’t by this time have to make many
changes myself, but I might rewrite some phrases to suit my way of telling the
news, and again I’ll check the facts. I
like to begin a story by identifying where it occurred, for instance “In
Somerset,” or “In Peru,” and by prefacing sports stories with “Tennis …” or
“Boxing …” We like to have a
light-hearted or humourous story to end the news – the “And finally” story – or
end with a story about animals or the royals.
‘On
the Early, when young children might be watching, we avoid using words like
“severed,” “mutilated,” “naked,” even “blood,” and don’t show film that might
be too graphic or confrontational and cause distress. In a political story we make every effort to
be impartial and present both sides of a situation, though in some cases one
side or another cannot be interviewed or will not co-operate in any way.
‘If a story has unusual names, and I need
to know the correct pronunciation, either I ask someone in the newsroom who has
been to the country concerned, or I ring up the embassy involved.
‘Finally, the story is retyped by one of
the six duty Production Assistants (PAs), who do the typing and timing of the
bulletins. They type each story on a
sheet of grey foolscap, with copies, and also on a narrow length of white paper
for the teleprompter. Later on, all the
teleprompter stories will be stuck together, head to tail, and rolled up. In the studio they are set in a machine, and
as a PA unwinds them at the same reading speed as the newscaster, an image of
them appears in a small box immediately below the camera lens. It‘s this the newscaster reads when he’s not
reading off the “greys” – his scripts on the desk before him. The “greys”, however, are his most reliable
reading matter, as they have been read over, emended and marked up by him. The teleprompter is a visual aid – it helps
to keep your face up. One shouldn’t and
can’t depend on it entirely.
‘The BBC have a similar system called
Autocue, which is twice as wide as our teleprompter roll, and if the camera is
quite close to the newsreader you might be able to see his eyes move as he
scans the lines.
‘Eventually there will be about 20 stories
in the running-order. No bulletin that
I have read in seven years has been transmitted as planned. It can’t be. The news is “live” and news is being made
all the time. Changes are made at the
last minute, even while we are on air.
New stories come in – sentences are written in – paragraphs are cut –
whole stories are dropped. Time is the
enemy. I read the news at about three
words a second, and everything is timed to allow for this. The Early News has to be exactly 11 minutes
long, not a second more.
‘At some point I put on some make-up. I do it myself – a quick wipe with some
pancake to get rid of the shine on forehead and nose. Then I put in my contact lenses. We’re not supposed to wear glasses. It’s thought that, apart from reflecting the
lights, they hide one’s eyes and expression.
What we wear is up to each newscaster, though we are discouraged from
wearing floral shirts and ties.
‘About 5.30, everyone involved in the
Early News assembles downstairs for a technical rehearsal – so that the
director in the control-room can check cameras, captions, sound, cues, timing
and other details. Behind the desk in
the studio I peer in a mirror, straighten my tie, and one of the sound
department fits an ear-piece in my left ear.
Through this I can hear everything that is going on in the control-room
– all the cues, countdowns, and occasional panics – not only during rehearsal
but also during transmission. While
newscasting I’m not only reading off the teleprompter and the “greys” but also,
via the ear-piece, receiving instructions from the control-room.
‘It sounds confusing. But somehow you manage to absorb only the
information that applies to yourself, and it helps, hearing the countdown of a
film, to time your lead-in precisely.
We never get buzzed on the desk telephone these days. In emergencies the director will shout in
your ear-piece, “Cut story 12!” or “Apologise for the loss of sound!” or just
“Stop there!”
‘The rehearsal is much like a dress rehearsal
in a theatre, and every news in a way is like a first night. It’s never the same. You rely on the others to play their parts
and hope that it will all hold together.
And it does. Somehow it always
does.
‘The rehearsal continues, stopping and
starting, people talking, swearing, making alterations. Some stories are late, just being typed – a
film isn’t in. On occasions I’ve not
been handed the first story, the lead, until seconds before we go on air. Often a late story or a new story will come
in while I’m halfway through the news.
It all has to be dealt with smoothly.
‘With seconds to go the floor manager
says, “Settle down, studio!” I take a
deep breath. I hear in my ear-piece the
PA counting us down – “Five, four, three, two, one.” The director says, “Cue grams. Take VTR.”
And as the music is faded out he says, “Cue Gordon.”
‘I begin reading the news.’
Perth, Western Australia, March 2015
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